Lady Business: 2020 silver linings; Vaccine skepticism and scientist vindication
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 117th issue, published December 20, 2020.
So Long, 2020
I started the pandemic by celebrating my late grandmother’s 100th birthday in a crowd of other people. It was March 11, in a restaurant outside Baltimore, with a loved one I wouldn’t see in person for the rest of the year and might not see for months more next year. It was the last meal I would have inside a packed restaurant; the last time I would travel without a face mask and a quarantine-and-testing plan. As my aunt drove me back to the Amtrak station that evening, we got the news alerts that the NBA was shutting down, that other teetering dominoes were swiftly starting to topple.
A few days later, I wrote that, “I’m grateful I have health insurance, and paid sick leave, and a job that allows me to work from home for as long as I need to without jeopardizing my ability to get paid or to continue accessing that health insurance. I’m grateful that the things getting canceled on me are inconveniences or minor setbacks, rather than threats to my livelihood.” And that has remained true this year, as tired and stressed and heartsick and Extremely Over It All as I’ve felt at times.
I’m grateful for the time I have gotten to spend with family and friends who I otherwise wouldn’t have lived with for weeks at a time. I’m grateful for Chicago and the Philadelphia suburbs, in a year when I had to give up on Greece and Montreal, and that I spent the money on that last-minute trip to Puerto Rico in February. I’m grateful for the first female vice president, and the faster-than-expected availability of an approved coronavirus vaccine, whatever distribution challenges lie ahead in the months to come.
I’m grateful for a job that has allowed me to do some work I’m very proud of this year, from affecting FDA policy and highlighting the longstanding racial disparities in health that the pandemic has only worsened, to interrogating our terrible collective burden of grief and the complicated double standard facing women starting businesses. I’m grateful for your readership of and replies to this newsletter.
And I’m grateful for the next couple of weeks of vacation and rest. It’s been a tough, weird year on a global scale, and one that I can’t be sorry to see end. But I hope that its final weeks will bring rest and more reasons to be optimistic—and that we’ll all have much more to be grateful about at this time next year.
Lady Bits
--“As a woman of color, nine out of 10 people I know well are saying they will not get the vaccine. There simply isn’t the trust.” I reported on the horrific history behind this skepticism, and the efforts that public health officials, including Black doctors and scientists and individual vaccine advocates, are making to overcome the legacy of racism in health care.
--"I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart enough.” This STAT feature from November has some sweet vindication for Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian immigrant and scientist who struggled to get funding for her 1990s research on messenger RNA—research that laid the foundations for the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
--Lady Business will be on vacation for the rest of the year. Happy happy 2021, everyone!
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