The coronavirus continues to evolve. Why aren’t we able to?
A Black healer-researcher’s take on integrative healing that gets beneath our fear, our fights, and invites us to lean into the portal that is now.
A friend recently came to visit the United States for the first time in years, and asked for my take on what’s really going on with omicron and the pandemic. I didn’t realize I had so much to say. I realized I should probably say more of this also to the world, and so here is a combined story of many conversations over the last many months - with healers, doctors, friends, and with myself, over three sections:
Healing at the intersections
How to protect ourselves, really?
What the Rona can still teach us - To evolve
Healing at the intersections
At this point, each of us seem to have a different experience of the pandemic, and so, as a community healer and public health researcher, with friends in health care across the United States, here’s what I’m seeing: Friends are still dying, still burying loved ones. Some from COVID-19, but also many from strange illnesses, drug overdoses, suicides, guns and community violence. Doctor friends of mine are reporting 100% COVID rates among their pregnant clients. Health care workers haven’t had a day off in over 2 years, and their hospitals are short-staffed and strained. Virtually everyone I know is struggling with mental illness, burnout, and despair.
As a United Nations public health researcher-turned-doula, bodyworker and holistic medicine practitioner, I see wellness at the intersections. I see it in historical and cultural context. I just finished an entire medical school term in immunology, studying mRNA technology, CRISPR and other forms of medical genetic engineering, including how vaccines train and enhance the body’s natural ability to fight specific viruses like COVID-19. I have a friendly, but not naive relationship with science, and I also know that western medicine was built on the convenient results of dangerous experiments.
In my work alongside school, I research and write on the history of racism in western medicine - the embarassing legacies of slave experimentation upon which our obstetric care is founded, the theft of Black and brown bodies from still fresh graves that developed the study of anatomy with cadavers and advanced the field of surgery, and the ongoing bias in doctors today that lead them to believe, wrongly, that Black patients have thicker skin and feel less pain than white patients.
I hope to follow in the footsteps of Black doctors like Kimberly Manning and Zoe Julian and integrative traditional healers like Cheo Torres who wish to use medicine for healing, equity, and bridging cultures, not for maximizing profits. We try our best to translate medical-speak, reading between the lines of exploitation and experimentation, and educating that sometimes, the experimental treatment is the tragedy, as in the case of Tuskegee patients and Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. But sometimes, the tragedy is the medicine unjustly withheld from us - such as attention to our pain, or equitable access to vaccines in Black and brown countries.
I see how healing this pandemic requires not only science, but also heart and historical context, as well as an understanding of psychology and nervous system function to see that we are all in a chronic fight-or-fight mode by now, which stunts our ability to make thoughtful decisions or accomplish anything besides what our limbic system is trained to do - fight, or flight.
How to protect ourselves, really?
Here's the thing. Vaccines and boosting cannot guarantee you from getting sick. You just get less sick. As in, you might still be miserably sick - you just don't go to the hospital and die - kind of sick. Even those of us with minor symptoms are sick with fever, fatigue and brain fog, caring for sick kids, and unable to work for up to weeks at a time. This is not the medical catastrophe part, but the mental health and economic crisis part. If I go out, I’ll get COVID-19, but if I stay home indefinitely, I face a deep depression, which for me, could have far more serious health consequences. We’re already teetering on the edge of burnout, if we aren’t there already.
Personally, since December I was already experiencing a strange set of symptoms I attributed to burnout - low and unstable energy through the day, sweating at night, hot flashes, dry nose, a rash, and a bright redness released from my skin when I did cupping on myself. Eastern and indigenous medicine might call this an excess heat imbalance. Western medicine might call it thyroid or hormonal issues. As an integrative health practitioner, I brought more African and Ayurvedic foods and spices into my diet, increased my sleep and decreased my screen time, took magnesium supplements and was genuinely feeling better just before getting COVID-19. Twice.
Thanks to the wonders of evolution and mutating viruses - possibilities I wish I had known more about - the omicron variant has so many changes to its spike protein that it’s now possible to catch one variant after another. This has also made vaccines less effective, requiring additional boosters and new clinical trials for an omicron-specific vaccine. As I explained to my mother with a high school education, most viruses wear a “coat” and this one’s coat keeps changing - faster than our bodies and our vaccines can keep up!
Side note: Even with a Columbia University master’s degree in public health 10 years ago, it wasn’t until my term in immunology last year that I even had a clue of basic science literacy to help me understand exactly how mRNA and antibody infusion technologies work, how viruses spread, mutate, and what tools worked best to prevent and recover from this illness.
How did I somehow miss these basics in infectious disease? Well, for one, we were taught a social nuance, that the U.S. battled chronic diseases, not infectious ones. We focused on hypertension and diabetes, and left the infectious disease study to those interested in dengue fever and tuberculosis in poor countries and refugee camps. There was little talk of how the return of a global pandemic, combined with today’s frequent global travel, might connect us all in ways where we might regret such arrogance.
The pandemic we thought might be over, suddenly exploded and like an unexpected volcano, the inconsistencies of CDC guidelines and uncertainties over it all - when to return to schools and work, what to expect from vaccines, what the heck are these variants anyways - are now laid bare, and all over the floor, and all over us. Meanwhile, only holistic healers are having side conversations about the importance of immune system “boosting” by additionally taking Vitamin D, getting enough sleep, taking your sick days and asking your employer to support you when you get sick, and addressing the respiratory, inflammation and gut health issues that are likely to arise post-COVID.
Nothing makes sense. There’s no trustworthy leadership guiding us in what to do. No one is telling us how we can be 100% safe. That’s because we’re not safe, we’re still sick, we’re still dying, and this time, it feels so much more like we’re also on our own to navigate these waters. I think we now realize, what might have been helpful to have heard from the beginning, that:
Pandemics and plagues have come before in ways we couldn’t stop them. This time, we will do our very best to stop this one, but nature is always evolving, and sometimes science can’t always keep up. If our best medicines still can’t stop this, we will have to learn how to live in a new reality, where we live alongside risk and danger, and make choices the best we can, and live with them.
The choices we make will either strengthen us, or break us into pieces. The virus will show us who we are.
Vaccines as weaponized medicine
Then there's vaccines, and the silent war that has spread across the vaccinated versus unvaccinated, polarizing us even more so than race and political party (which I didn't even think possible.)
Vaccines, inoculations, immunizations (all the same thing) are old medicines that were brought into the medical mainstream by African and women folk healers, and are responsible for the elimination of smallpox (unfortunately, too late for our indigenous ancestors) and polio in the United States. mRNA is a new technological take on a very old medicine, essentially using the body’s own internal machinery to “build” a copy of one small part of the virus (the notorious, and changing, spike protein) and then training and enhancing the immune response in practice rounds, before an actual infection. It does not enter the cell nucleus or DNA. It does make edits to the set of “instructions” that arrive to the cell’s ribosomes (something like a cell factory) in order to build spike proteins that mimic that of the actual Coronavirus.
Because it is only a part of the virus and cannot cause real disease, it is considered safer than the old time way of delivering vaccines (putting pus from an infected person into a cut of a healthy person). But the body still reacts, and we see fever and all the symptoms that look pretty much like disease. Some people also have allergic reactions, bad side effects, and legitimate concerns about the limited amount of time it’s been researched, even if all the research so far has shown it to reduce far more severe disease than it causes.
It was meant to be one option for protection, along with a menu of public health measures including masks, physical distancing, testing, antibody infusions and other medications in the early stages of infection. Somehow, it became a war.
The media made it seem like getting vaccination was a magic pill – an honest hope, but a too-early conclusion – and therefore dubbed not getting vaccinated as irresponsible and inconsiderate. To the unvaxxed, getting vaccinated, looks like supporting big pharma, censoring the questions around vaccine side effects and how to make a thoughtful decision for yourself, and talking down to people from a high horse of the “scientific community.” (Again, I return to my point that we have no meaningful public education in school, media or otherwise on basic science literacy with which to truly understand the immune system and vaccines, let alone mRNA technology.)
Voluntary vaccination of those who were willing, was supposed to help us all. But as it turned political, judgmental, and into a barometer of one’s morals and “care” for community, we are ironically turning on one another, applying shame for not being either more woke or more down with community.
The vaccinated who apparently care so much, now gather unmasked at crowded restaurants even though we know vaccination does not block transmission. The CDC, our foundational source for science, is recommending return to work after 5 days after infection, without a required negative test. Vaccines have given enough protection to the wealthy, that decisions are starting to favor business over public health, which mirrors life pre-pandemic. I agree 100% that we have to find ways to create a new normal and continue with life. I think we could be doing that through conversation and connection. We could have done that from the beginning, and set a precedent to let this illness unite us, rather than divide us. We’ve chosen otherwise.
Let’s zoom out into the bigger, future picture. Vaccination status is creating a kind of first vs. second class status that helps us in no way to build our immunity, prevent illness or recover from the fact that our entire country now is very mentally and physically sick. Either in hospitals, or home for weeks at a time, or struggling with depression, drug abuse or suicidal thoughts, we are already numbing, fading, and dying. Of course, in true American happy ending fashion, we are trying and pretending to be fine, taking flashy photos and warm vacations where we can find a moment to relax and forget. I want to forget, too. But as a realist, I’m watching our culture fall apart.
What the Rona can still teach us – To evolve
By most accounts, this virus evolved from nature. Acclaimed author Arundhati Roy has called this time a portal. As millions of Americans are getting sick with Omicron, our collective immunity is hopefully growing stronger, even as we tragically lose more people than we ever thought possible. Some of us are learning to survive in conditions we never thought possible, as we are sharpened by life in a global pandemic and crises in vaccination wars, mental health, economics, race relations, police brutality, climate change… I’m sure that anyone reading this can add to the list more crises that have touched them personally.
Yet I’m reminded of words by West African healer and elder, Sobonfu Some, in her book, The Spirit of Intimacy:
“Conflict is a wake-up call sent by spirit to remind us of the purpose we are here to fulfill. In an indigenous context, it is seen as a gift, meant to help us move forward. It is through conflicts that we gain knowledge of ourselves and learn new situations for using our gifts.”
Let’s talk about the gifts and learning I’m also seeing, amid the rubble. Over back-to-back COVID and three weeks of illness, I learned that friends don’t let friends muscle their way through illness. My friends sat me down, and urged me to make a very important decision to ask my employer for a week off. It was the hardest, and possibly most intelligent, self-loving, and impactful decision of my life. Instead of limping along like I had for months already, I have real energy again. I am getting acupuncture and moxa to heal from post-covid inflammation and tired lungs. Finally, I have the extra brain cells to write and share what I’m seeing and thinking, as a Black healer and public health thinker, in a time of limited vision or leadership.
I see this as a time to lean into ecosystem work. How do we co-exist, build deeper roots, and shelter those most vulnerable among us? How do we grow ever larger branches, not for ourselves, but in order to share with others without the same access to the sun? What that looks like for me, personally, is setting my own ethics and personal guidelines around COVID risks, being a part of collectives with people who are different than me, being in intentional relationship and conversation with people of all vaccination views and statuses, taking breaks and keeping a healthy distance from the news and social media, and taking extremely seriously my own health.
I am learning how my body works, its triggers and sensitivities, and how to both protect and heal it for the inevitable bouts of illness and breakdowns to come. I hold tight to my fellow healers, doctors and nurses in my community, and I make sure they are taken care of too. I do what I can, after filling my own cup. Not too much. Not too little.
The research and writing I do now on antiracism, collective mindset, and whole-soul healing is the best I can offer, to small pockets of people who still care. So many of us do. So many of us want to, but we haven’t found ways to make it a priority, to make space in a busy and hard life. Therein lies an open invitation, to prioritize exploring the healing you didn’t think you needed. But you know, deep within, something is still untended. Waiting. Incomplete and unsatisfied with the priorities you have set. What if you took just a little bit of time to tend to your soul and your ancestors’ healing, as well as the illnesses of the present? What if you asked, what must I do now so that the future fills and excites me? These too, are medicines to marinate on, to experiment with, and to report out our results to the broader community.
I’ll end with a rephrased reference to a podcast called “Grief is a Sneaky Bitch” with John A. Powell, head of the University of California Berkeley Institute for Othering and Belonging. Powell explains that this is a time of heightened fear, so our pre-frontal cortex and executive functions are offline, and the amygdala is activated. This explains why there’s so much anger, harm and illogical behavior. What people will respond to now is not shaming and control, but reassurance and safety. Not logic.
When we constantly highlight fear and loss in the media and our conversations, the fear becomes self-replicating. But there's also incredible beauty and change blossoming now, that we often don’t talk about or even notice is happening - people stepping up to care for one another, care for themselves, taking steps to get healthier, and addressing grief, trauma, and collective, systemic trauma in ways we never did before.
It really is a moment like the famous Charles Dickens quote:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."
This time can be seen as a tomb, or a womb.
What you must do is to ask yourself:
Will you make choices as a merchant of war, or as a midwife?
Ihotu Jennifer Ali, MPH, LMT
Follow me @ihotuali on Instagram & Twitter
Join us for free ecosystem, ancestral and social justice learning & dialogue @ the Oshun Center for Intercultural Healing
