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| Instead of trying to get you wonderful people to write a list of links, today we're just going to give you a sort of bonus column from Connie Schultz, free of charge. |
| We'll be back with our regularly scheduled newsletter and will expect all the links to be clicked on. For now, here's Connie. |
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| This week I wrote about an encounter with a COVID denier, and as is so often the case with a column, I ran out of room before I ran out of thoughts. |
| I had arrived at the pharmacy for two scheduled vaccinations – flu and the new COVID booster – and until a woman sitting next to me knew that we got along great. A troubling discussion ensued, but what has stayed with me five days later is the response of another customer who was eavesdropping on our conversation. When I said three of my friends had died of COVID, she scoffed. |
| "No, they didn't," she said. "The hospital is paid $3,000 a patient to tell you they died of COVID. Never happened." The woman sitting next to me nodded. "Exactly." |
| In the column, I did what columnists should do, which is pivot to the reasons why we should get the COVID booster. My encounter was just that – mine – and I didn't need to drag the reader any further into how I was feeling about such a jarring encounter. |
| But five days later, I'm still rattled by that woman's response. On the drive home, my husband called. After describing the encounter, I said, "Why am I so shaken by this?" |
| "You've never had this happen in person," he said. "It can be shocking to see this level of denial." |
 | | Hope Larkin, the daughter of DC National Guard Captain Matthew Larkin, helping place white flags among The IN AMERICA: How Could This Happen art project installed on the DC Armory Parade Ground and created by artist Suzanne Firstenberg. The project opened to the public on Friday, October 23, 2020 in Washington, DC honoring each of the nearly 225,000 lives lost in the U.S. due to COVID-19 with a white flag. | | Jack Gruber, USA TODAY | |
| Certainly, we've read about people who are anti-vax, and we've seen videos of extremists coughing on strangers in stores. I regularly visit the online Johns Hopkins COVID resource center to track the number of cases and vaccination rates across the country. But all of this has been from a distance. I've never come face-to-face with someone who, |
| initially friendly and engaging, became hostile simply because I was getting a COVID vaccine. |
| But that's not why I keep coming back to that exchange. It was the other angry woman, the one who wanted me to believe I had been duped about how my friends had died. |
| I cannot imagine a scenario in which a person told me about losing a loved one and my response would be to deny how they died. |
 | | Getting vaccinated on Sept. 9, 2022, in Chicago. | | Scott Olson/Getty Images | |
| No matter how bizarre the purported circumstances, my first words – my only appropriate response – is to say, "I'm sorry." I'm sorry you lost your mother, your brother, your father, your friend. This is what most of us would do. Expressing sympathy is an act of basic decency. |
| I'm not about to argue that this pandemic has robbed us of our civility, but I am increasingly concerned about what it has done to our collective sense of compassion. I count myself as part of the problem. |
| I am not proud of my immediate, unspoken reaction to that woman. I saw her as the enemy, the kind of person willing to endanger others with her reckless beliefs. |
| This is harsh of me. If she does not believe that COVID is real, she also does not think she is inflicting potential harm on others by remaining unvaccinated. In such moments I try to be more like my mother, who never gave up on people: May that woman stay safe from a virus she's so sure will never find her. |
| - Connie Schultz |
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