Status Update with Mackerel the Torbie Cat

Mackerel, sometimes known as Big Mac, is not a new resident of the Cat Sanctuary. He was the first member of the social cat family to move there, after he had successfully trained a child to bring food to his family when they were alley cats. Mac was born and raised feral until he was about three months old. Then he came to the Cat Sanctuary, spent a night hiding in a closet, was let out to explore the place, and gave me an enthusiastic vote of confidence--he was a politely reserved, but gentle, even protective, semi-cuddly pet from that day forward. 

In the real world Mackerel would be one of those awfully old cats who are sometimes found, still technically alive, sleeping 23 out of 24 hours a day, if he were still with us. He's not. But he left a message behind that is relevant today.

I'm seeing so much hate and blame being flung back and forth on the Internet today.

"THOSE AWFUL PEOPLE who've CHOSEN NOT TO HAVE ANY VACCINES for the DREADED CORONAVIRUS are (keeping my community in permanent quarantine) and/or (causing more people to have repeated cases and possibly DIE) and/or (allowing this DEADLY VIRUS to spread to my part of the world) and/or..." probably several other things. I don't actually read very far into these yowls. 

"THOSE AWFUL PEOPLE who are PUSHING THESE UNTESTED, INEFFECTIVE, DANGEROUS VACCINES for THE PUNY LITTLE CORONAVIRUS are (killing our children) and/or (killing our elders) and/or (killing young people who ought to be on their jobs today) FOR PROFIT and/or (possibly doing us permanent damage) and/or (deliberately injecting us with...)..." I don't actually read very far into these yowls, either. 

It's sort of like the Great Quest for Reliable Internet Connections in my home town, where people may be paying for whatever services they want, since the free public computer centers have all been shut down, but they don't have reliable Internet services. Friends who live out in the country and pay for even an expensive land phone line and personal, private connection haven't had reliable connections since the leaves were on the trees; they have the sort of connections my cell phone gets at home, where most messages do eventually get through, but usually all in a bunch, between two and three o'clock in the morning, and I can usually call out but may have to walk half a mile to find a signal. Friends who live in town and pay for the land phone and private connection may or may not actually be connected for two hours at a time; if one device is connected that long, for sure another one won't be. "Phones used to work. This phone used to work," they say, bashing frustratedly at the "send" buttons on their cell phones. Last year my cell phone was pretty reliable. Last winter, up into February, private Internet connections were pretty reliable. Has this ever changed.

According to one theory, this is a plot to get people to vote for mandatory federally funded broadband connections that will link everybody's home to the Internet, all the time, whether they want to be connected or not. For purposes of espionage.

According to another theory, it's not a plot but an ongoing mechanical problem. Some say it started when someone managed to scrape copper off some part of the main cell phone signal tower. (How this was done, or whether it's possible, I don't know, and I've heard no theories about whether the scraper survived.) 

Some say replacement wires either haven't worked as well, or have not been installed because (the scraper was the only person in the county who knew how to replace the wires, and he didn't survive) and/or (different companies keep sending people out to sabotage the tower) and/or (the telephone company isn't sending out repair people because of the coronavirus) and/or (insert theory of choice here--none of them seems very probable). 

Some say the company's refusing to replace the wires as a way of punishing all of us. 

Some say the original wires were funded by a grant and the funding to replace them has not been made available, which sounds plausible to me, but I've seen no documentation that it's true. 

If I hadn't used several different devices, in several different places, without connecting to my well-documented accounts such as this one for a moment, I'd think the difficulties I'd been having this year were further cyberbullying by Bayer's corporate operatives. I'm not sure that some of them haven't been that, but I am sure that some of them are county-wide. Blackwater, where I've never mentioned online that I even have relatives, is more of a dead zone than Gate City.

All I know is, I have to pick a big-chain restaurant and order something I consider, at best, overpriced to get an Internet connection, and even then some sites don't work. 

Same way with the coronavirus vaccines. I know people who've had them and report no side effects of any kind. I know people who I'm pretty sure have had the coronavirus, and some of them had pretty dang bad cases, but they still refuse to believe the coronavirus exists or had anything to do with the colds, flu, mononucleosis, er um, heart attacks, they had when other people were accepting the diagnosis of coronavirus. I don't know any of the people who've had the coronavirus since March, but I am reliably told that some people have, that some people with noticeable symptoms have been under age 60, and that at two local hospitals all the people reporting coronavirus symptoms this summer/fall have had two (or more) vaccines for last year's version, last spring.

Conspiracy theories abound. How would they not? Unless people actually remembered, and used, what we learned about cutting-edge virology at university in the 1980s. And how would that happen, when so many people weren't at university in the 1980s? 

Vaccines for virus are always very tricky to develop. There's always a risk of contamination, even if chemical companies were scrupulously ethical about chemical pollutants, which they're not. There's always a high probability that this year's vaccine won't touch next year's virus. There's always a chance that repeated vaccines may actually overload the immune system and make people more vulnerable to different kinds of virus. 

None of this is new. Vaccines for flu and measles were controversial for many years. Some batches of vaccines were deadly. In 1976 the flu vaccine being recommended by doctors who recommended flu vaccine at all turned out to cause cancer--a fast-growing, ugly, frequently fatal kind, at that. Tell me that, for the majority of humankind, vaccines for a virus that's not fatal do not stand up to a risk-benefit analysis, and you'll be preaching to the choir, because I had "chronic mononucleosis" for most of two years after having a completely unnecessary measles vaccine. And if it were possible to blame one person for that experience I'd still like to track that person down, inject that person with "chronic mononucleosis" (with liver infection and long-term asexuality and permanent sterility and maybe, depending on their DNA, worse), and broadcast recordings of "There's NOTHING WRONG with you if you'd only MAKE AN EFFORT and STOP BEING SO LAZY!" through their home for years, too. (In this context "lazy" is defined as "having chronic cramps that originate in the liver and extend to the scalp, the toes, and all points between," not at all like "waking up and realizing it's the weekend.")

I had the unique symptoms of the dreaded coronavirus last year. It was not like a glyphosate reaction, which involves cramping and bleeding. It was not like walking any distance in a new pair of shoes. It was not, as far as actual pain is concerned, even in a class with taking a drink of coffee before it's had a chance to cool down. It was just a funny kind of cough accompanied by mild pericarditis, the whole thing lasting a couple of hours. Most people hardly even notice any kind of coronavirus even as a "cough" or "chest cold," and most of our grandmothers always told us that "a cough" or "a chest cold" was not worth our attention, much less a doctor's. This is natural immunity, which seems to go with our human DNA; as a serious threat to health coronavirus is literally for the birds. So I had natural immunity and then I added naturally acquired immunity, which, all doctors will agree, is the best kind to have. There's a good medical case to be made for the argument that taking vaccines when you've recently acquired immunity to a virus is a bad idea. I remember learning about that, the hard way, after flunking out of university with mono. So, no, I've not had the vaccine. Simple R.B.A.

Would I have the vaccine if a job required me to be close to other people? I'd consider it, just for those people's peace of mind...but I would feel obliged to tell them that my having the vaccine would do very little to protect them. The air doesn't come down with virus, rocks don't, doorknobs don't, but infected people can deposit virus into the air and on rocks and on doorknobs, and you can get the virus from the air or a rock or a doorknob. What other people's being vaccinated does for you is make them more efficient immune carriers, more likely to expose you to the virus. Immune carriers redistribute fewer actual virus than people who are actively coughing do, and virus count (or "load") may make a difference to some people...or not.

If those people were especially fragile, immune-compromised, if they'd been living with unacknowledged celiac disease and/or glyphosate poisoning for years, if they'd been pre-diagnosed HIV-positive, if they'd been taking immunosuppressant drugs for arthritis or lupus...God help them. God is about the only factor that can help them. Some people just aren't going to be with us very long and, if you wanted to spend more time with them, you should start doing that by phone now.

Fact: Most hospitals report that most of their recent coronavirus cases are unvaccinated.

Fact: The death rate remained constant when the coastal cities in North America were hit by coronavirus. Even though most cases are still mild and most people who die from coronavirus were still very old and/or very ill when they picked up the virus, the death rate even in nursing homes increased right around the time the vaccines became available.

Fact: But, if you were following the numbers daily--I think most States have official web sites tracking this, and on your right you should see a link to a blog that's been doing it, so the numbers show up in my Blogspot reading list!--you will remember, as one of Robert Kennedy's friends evidently forgot this week, that the COVID death rate started to climb shortly before vaccines became available. So that particular statistic has to be regarded as correlation not causation. 

What actually happened in Virginia was that we went into frantic protect-the-nursing-homes mode months before most of us had any contact with the virus, so our most vulnerable population weren't exposed to the virus while the active population were having the mild cases some of us are still denying we had. Then winter came, the virus gained virulence, and the number of old, sick people dying of pneumonia in nursing homes doubled--and most of those people had been too sick for too long to be missed anyway, so it was possible even for writers, like RFK's friend, not to notice this. (Well, I noticed.) Or for conspiracy theorists to deny it. (I'm skeptical about ruling out conspiracy theories as well as believing them, but this particular fact is not subject to viable conspiracy theories.) Then the virus was in the nursing homes, so while the rest of us went back to work and enjoyed the months when (in Virginia) COVID seemed to be over, the oldest, sickest patients continued to die at this increased rate even after pneumonia usually stops raging through nursing homes every year. 

Fact: The overall death rate is rising. The overall average life expectancy has dropped, though not far. COVID is real; people have been losing parents and grandparents all summer long. In Virginia most of us were just glad that most of those people did not die of immediate reactions to the vaccine, as we'd feared they might do. The crowd who sit on the porch at the local retirement building told me they'd all been scheduled for vaccines, and I thought "This is where we lose all of them," and some months later the one of them who has my cell phone number texted to report...I hadn't been walking past the building, since the other route to McDonald's is quicker, so they were all worried about me. 

Fact: Whether working people have had the vaccine or not has had no effect, in Virginia, on nursing home patients' death rate. Nursing home patients don't seem to be the ones complaining of this year's coronavirus--yet. Details are being kept private but the current cases seem to be active people who may have added too many vaccines to their recently naturally acquired immunity, overloaded their immune system, and had to lie down and recover from the symptoms they were able to ignore last year.

Sometimes it surprises me, though, when people who've seemed levelheaded join the yowling chorus of ignorance, on either side. Laura McKowen, most recently. (For those who don't know, she's an author and recovery blogger who's switched from posting at that blog, linked on your right, to sending out e-mail. You can join her e-mail list here.) We don't expect her to rage at anybody who's not marketing drugs and alcohol or committing violent crime, so when she raged, even in a moderate and reasonable way, against the unvaccinated, people sat up and took notice. Nobody should try to diagnose diseases by e-mail but in real life that sort of thing is likely to be a symptom...of coronavirus, or cardiovascular disease, or both.

This brings us back to Mackerel, the only tomcat I've ever loved. (Serena might ask indignantly, "What about our Traveller?" and I might reply, "Tragically, because he was a lovable cat if a sickly and not very clever one, Traveller did not live to be a full-grown tomcat.") 

Mackerel was one of those cats whose ability to figure out what humans are saying, and use it to learn actual words they recognize later on, is almost frightening. You have to pay attention to what you say in front of a cat like Mac. They understand...and sometimes they misunderstand, but they are listening, so their misunderstandings become real problems in a way most animals' lack of understanding of human speech never does. 

I took Mac in for his second rabies vaccination, right on schedule. He was now a full-grown tomcat, and on that day he made it clear that I would not be able to put him into a carrying cage with my bare hands if he didn't want to go in. Some people settle for trapping the cats who share their homes like wild animals; I wasn't prepared to do that. I asked Mac nicely to go into the cage, and he went in, nicely, as a favor to me, once I'd admitted I could not just shove him in. So he had his jab, and he didn't bite the vet or try to leap out the window or become sick in any noticeable way, but he was obviously not pleased. The relative who drove for us suggested we pick up some take-out chicken teriyaki sticks in town as a treat for all the cats, to soothe Mac's feelings. We bought the teriyaki sticks and the other cats enjoyed them, as always--but Mac refused to eat his. He was making a statement. He wasn't too sick to nibble on leftover kibbles, but he was not going to accept a treat as compensation for what he obviously regarded as torture and humiliation. 

And I said, "Sorry, Mac, that's just the price you pay for being a pet and getting regular meals." 

And he gave me a long, sad look that showed that he had a pretty good idea what I meant.

From that day forward, Mackerel was a very friendly feral cat who lived in the woods.

He came home, every few weeks, to visit his family. While cat-kissing his biological relatives he would call me to come out and be greeted too. He'd leap up into my lap to be groomed and petted, enjoying the attention. I'd break out a treat for Mac. The other cats would eat the treat. Mac wouldn't touch it. If the price of meals was annual rabies vaccinations, Mac would never take food from me again. He still liked me, he nonverbally said, but there are limits to everything.

Mackerel no longer holds the honor of being the only tomcat I've ever seen seem to like male kittens, or have protective fatherly feelings for female kittens. He's not the only tomcat I've ever seen tear into a larger animal in defense of a friend--though only social tomcats ever do that, and Mac certainly rode the biggest dog, for the longest distance, I've ever seen or heard of a cat doing. Of tomcats who have any protective instinct, most seem willing to defend only one friend; Mac was fearless in defense of his human, his sister, and her kittens. (He might have been protective of the local female cats whose kittens, unlike his sister's viable kittens, resembled him. I didn't see it, but I'd believe Mac would fight for those cats before I'd believe some other gray tabby tomcat would.) He is the only tomcat I have personally seen bring food to his kittens, though I've heard of a few others doing that. In any case he was not a normal tomcat. With normal tomcats, just hanging out and playing peaceably with their own kittens is something special; usually they want to be alone with the female they're visiting, and sometimes they try to get rid of kittens. Whereas Mac...considering that he was neither a man nor a native of Virginia, he did better at Being a Virginia Gentleman than some neighbors who have both of those advantages.

He kept himself healthy, rarely even needing help to remove dog ticks, for more than three of his more than five years in this world. Then one day, about a mile from home, I found his recently mangled body resting beneath a stop sign beside the road. He'd dodged motor vehicles many times but eventually he misjudged one. I was almost glad; he'd lived much longer and apparently enjoyed life more than normal tomcats do, and the body didn't look as if he could have known what hit him. 

There are people--of all species--good, intelligent people of good will--who would rather die than be vaccinated. This is a physical, biological trait, not dependent on the convoluted human brain, and it's not going to change. Serena's great-great-great-great-grand-uncle Mackerel was one of those people. The human yelling at you across the COVID vaccine fence just might be another one. Show some respect, please.