Vaccine was worth the headache

Dizziness, chills and a roaring headache.

Those could be symptoms of love-sickness, appropriate for Valentine’s Day weekend. But they’re not. Instead, they are my body’s reaction to the first dose of the COVID vaccine.

Don’t misconstrue this to mean that I’m sorry I received the shot. I’m not. If anything, I’m grateful that my job as a teacher qualified me for protection. I recognize that many people who want and need the vaccine haven’t yet been able to secure a place in line.

And I’m definitely going back for the second dose in a few weeks. I’ve heard and read that people who actually have had COVID — as I did in the fall — have a stronger reaction to the first dose and a more muted response to the second. For people who have never had COVID, these reactions are reversed — fewer side-effects after the first dose, more after the second.

In reality, what I experienced weren’t side-effects. It was, instead, my body responding to the vaccine in a way anticipated and intended by its makers. My immune system was learning how to deal with the virus. Because it had already done so once before, for real, some of the antibodies still in my system reacted more violently — they didn’t walk away from the bar fight, but instead took it outside for a good thrashing in the alley, so to speak.

The vaccine was an important step toward normal, and one I was glad to take.

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I must confess, however, to confusion and saltiness, to borrow a word from the younger generation, over how inequitably Ohio’s public schools have dealt with the pandemic. It’s a microcosm of the way the nation’s schools have handled COVID and a reflection of the mismanagement from the federal level on down over the past year.

In some districts, students have not been in face-to-face classrooms since last March. A condition for receiving the vaccine was a promise by these districts to resume in-person learning, at least in a hybrid model, by March 1.

The March deadline has received pushback in some quarters because many teachers won’t have received a second dose of vaccine by then.

Meanwhile, districts in our area have been in session and in person one way or another for most of the school year, with only a few weeks of remote-learning to help stop community spread.

I understand decisions are made by each district, so differing circumstances came into play. Local control is essential.

Still, with the majority of Ohio’s counties designated red (level three, very high exposure and spread) since the Public Health Advisory Alert System went into effect — and with some counties, including Stark, reaching purple (level four, severe exposure and spread) at various points — it’s difficult to imagine the criteria for all-in, hybrid, and all-remote differing so much by district and county.

Surely it isn’t that more conservative, red-leaning (in the political sense) communities are less concerned about students’ and teachers’ health and more willing to tolerate the risk of spread than more progressive, Democratic-leaning communities. Or is it?

Regardless, it is hard for educators, like me, who have been in the trenches throughout this school year, scrubbing desks and gerrymandering seating charts to keep something close to six feet of space between students, to understand why some districts are allowed to delay face-to-face contact not only until vaccines are fully administered, but ventilation issues have been resolved.

And now, right on cue, come concerns about “loss of learning” and the need for remediation — longer school days, summer classes, and the like. Gov. DeWine says our kids are only young once, an observation that is as heartfelt as it is pointless.

Let’s hope wiser heads prevail about extending an already interminable-feeling school year for Ohio’s students.

Yes, kids are behind based on arbitrary, adult-designated standards. But they are also surviving a pandemic, with all the social, emotional, and financial trauma that entails.

Time enough when the dust and virus settle next school year to fret over what they’ve lost educationally. This year, let’s celebrate what they’ve endured and how well they’ve survived.

And let’s open up more conversations about safety and equity, examining why health risks to students and staff were more tolerated in some places than in others.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter