The Scientists Behind the Initial Proven COVID-19 Vaccines
I was at first confused by Time's decision to name a "kid of the year" (apparently is a new recognition), which I had confounded with its Person of the Year. (I maintain the traditional "Man of the Year", mostly as a protest against political correctness. I may have blogged in the past an incident stemming from my days at Catholic Newman while a graduate student at UH; One day I opened up a missal and saw that someone had scribbled out in ink "men" in the Nicene Creed phrase "for us men and for our salvation". I quickly noticed the same in every other missal nearby. The term "men" was meant in a general sense as both males and females. The Church had honored female saints through its 2000-year history. That ideological feminists wanted to engage in symbolic rubbish, judgmentally distorting the meaning in context, was infuriating to me. I detested the idea that ideological feminists stood in judgment over centuries-old religious texts. In fact, some of my women friends were among those. I remember one personal incident in particular. We had usually mixed-gender lectors for the two readings before the gospel. I was an active lector, but we had a long rotation. One Sunday morning, the assigned woman didn't show up, and the coordinator was scrambling at literally the last minute prior to Mass to find a replacement and solicited me to fill him. I don't think I was aware of who/what gender the originally assigned lector was, and I agreed. The ideologues were incensed by two male lectors; I was incensed by the judgmental hypocrites. I had not solicited the opportunity to serve; I was doing a favor for the coordinator, and somehow I was being attacked as part of an absurd sexist conspiracy; obviously they spent more time of speaking vs. reading what's in the Bible.
I don't know why Time named Biden and Harris as Person of the Year; it's not unlike Obama for being named Nobel Peace Prize winner over not being George W. Bush, only in this case it's for being "Anybody But Trump".
There was a reason I waited to publish this post until the first day of Pfizer's initial rollout of its COVID-19 vaccine. The fact that Pfizer, Moderna and others have succeeded (or will succeed) in launching a viable vaccine just months after the impact of this destructive novel coronavirus is a staggering triumph of our free market system. Congratulations and thanks to Hamilton Bennett and countless other fellow scientists who worked tirelessly and almost anonymously to bring us the light at the end of the tunnel for an end to this tragic pandemic.
