New Mexico Jewish Link Spring, 2021 view as published here
Rockower Award Winner, 2022 Social Justice and Humanitarian Reporting, American Jewish Press Association, Magazine Division.

By Diane Joy Schmidt

In case you’ve become complacent after our year-long lockdown, opening the newspapers on any given day will reawaken you to the urgency of the pandemic. Sometimes personal stories hit the hardest – an anesthesiologist writes about looking into the eyes of his terrified patients as he intubates them, knowing that some may not wake up again; in Brazil, where the president has followed no health policy, when the oxygen ran out at a hospital, the intubated patients suffocated and died. Now news reports are slowly beginning to surface revealing how Trump, simply wanting to make states look bad, deliberately slowed access to PPE last spring and then in the fall, refused funding to the states to prepare for the vaccination program. 

A radiologist, Dr. Bailey, who has been working with Covid patients since December, 2019, has been in touch with the Sephardic Heritage Program here while applying to the Portuguese citizenship program. She offered to share her experiences as a radiologist, and to share the latest recommendations for what preventive measures we all can be taking now. She also has been personally and actively involved in trying to bring shipments of PPE here from overseas, and relates how they were confiscated by the Trump administration.

Bailey explained that as patients come into the hospital with the Covid virus, they first will get a chest X-ray. But, she explained, “it’s very difficult, sometimes to actually discern what’s happening on a chest X ray, the chest x-ray may look normal, but the patient is very, very symptomatic,” having difficulty breathing, “so they move on to a CT scan (a CT scan, or computerized tomography scan, often pronounced ‘cat scan,’ is a method of making multiple X-ray images of parts of the body with a computer). It’s not uncommon to have a normal chest X ray and a very abnormal CT scan with the virus.”

   “We’re getting a lot of CT scans looking for thrombus (blood clots) in the lungs. This virus is an inflammatory disease, and so it attacks organs. Blood vessels are considered an organ system, and it’s causing clots. And so sometimes the shortness of breath may be more because you’re really having blood clots. So, the x-rays are followed by the CT of the chest, specifically looking not just for the COVID pneumonia, but also making sure that there’s no additional blood clots, you know, pulmonary embolus along with it.

“When you get a clot, if it’s big, and if it’s sitting in the wrong place, people immediately succumb to that because they can’t breathe, there’s something blocking their arteries. And, this can affect even younger people, it can affect all populations, because no one knows how this inflammatory disease will affect you. And we look at ultrasounds of the lower extremities, the legs, to see where those clots are coming from.” 

This reporter asked if taking baby aspirin might be a good preventative measure if you test positive for the virus. Dr. Bailey said that while aspirin is a blood-thinner, people must first check with their doctor, “because any medication you take always has a side effect.” Generally speaking, doctors say you should not take aspirin if you are already on blood thinners, if you have gastric issues like ulcers, or if it will interfere with other medications, like chemo, for instance. 

Dr. Bailey does however, without hesitation, strongly recommend Vitamin C for everyone, along with Vitamin D. “Vitamin C acts like an anti-inflammatory agent. We know that we’re all supposed to be taking vitamin D, but perhaps we need to also be telling people that Vitamin C is necessary.” She explained that prophylactically, you are getting your body strengthened to fight this virus. 

“One thing the hospitals are doing now is giving COVID patients IV vitamin C. there are physicians who are treating their patients with vitamin C. Vitamin C definitely works as an anti-inflammatory, it’s something you can take. It’s easy enough to get. It’s not a medication, you can’t overdo it.” 

According to NIH reports and other medical sources, the current daily recommendation is 1000 milligrams of Vitamin C and 5000 milligrams of Vitamin D. Dr. Bailey also said the liquid form, liposomal Vitamin C, is absorbed better by the body, and a brand, Lypo-Spheric Vitamin C, can be purchased online. 

“If your immune system is really at the top of where it could be, you’ll decrease the the worse effects that could possibly happen if you get the virus. And some people will just get COVID and go right through it. Vitamin C is one of the best things that everyday people can do for themselves, besides wearing a mask, to prevent getting the virus. I would love to see more people aware of Vitamin C.”

What does Dr. Bailey think about double-masking? “The medical community suggested to double-mask about six months ago, but this message never got out to the wider community. And part of that, I believe has been more because medicine has been politicized, rather than just being there for telling the facts. 

“Here, we have been double masking all along, and now we have the different strains. Getting the right masks is important. A bandana around your face doesn’t protect you. It’s better than nothing—it protects others if you sneeze, but it doesn’t protect you if someone else is talking to you. But it’s not like an N-95 masks, Of course, it would help if the country actually gave out masks to people. What has to occur now is for people to be double masked, take their vitamin D, take their vitamin C. Those are the prophylactic things people can do.”

Is Bailey hopeful that the Biden administration will handle the rollout of the vaccine better? “I do think they will handle it better. Studies are coming out, that only 60 to 70% of front-line workers are choosing to take the vaccine.” She says that has been due to a lack of transparency, and that the medical community now has a chance to get the word out so that people understand the research. “Still, this country won’t be back to where it was, until, we’re predicting, the fall of 2022.”

Dr. Bailey also expressed concern that vaccinations need to reach everyone. “We have to be able to reach marginalized communities…on the Indian reservations across this country, we already know they’re a population that’s always vulnerable, with regard to receiving medical care.”  

In the last week of January, the Navajo Times did report that the Navajo health system had reached 10% of their targeted vaccinations. At that time, according to a New York Times data map, New Mexico was at 6%. 

Dr. Bailey wanted to stress how devastating it has been that the messages about masking were garbled over the last year. When asked if it looks like we’ve dodged a bullet now, she said, 

“No, I don’t. What’s dodging the bullet? By the end of the year of 2020, 2021, we’re looking at 700,000 people. Could we say that we dodged the bullet? No, I think that we just we just didn’t do the right thing here.”

Dr. Bailey has been personally actively trying to get shipments of need masks delivered, but those efforts had been blocked. “In the spring of last year, what we were bringing in was being confiscated by the Trump administration. We’ve had shippers who have stated that they could not bring it in. Hospitals were scrambling for PPE. And not because there was a lack of getting it from other countries who were selling it. China, Thailand or anywhere else, but, you just could not get it in, and that helped to spread this virus. People could not protect themselves early. With this new administration, I will try again. But under the Trump administration, we could not get them.”

Bailey said that they were not able to ascertain what happened to the shipment that she had ordered that was confiscated. She said, “The sender didn’t get paid, and it wasn’t returned to them, and we didn’t receive it.” They tried to track it down but, “it’s a quagmire coming through very busy ports, in Boston, New York, Miami, it’s very difficult to track down. So we’re hoping that Biden can look at that process. The question remains, what happened to all of those PPE’s that were taken? Where did they go? We hope someday there’s an investigation, we figure that out. So we don’t know what happened to them. But we do know that all of this action, or inaction, led to where we are today.”

Indeed. Medical personnel all across the country have struggled, watching patients and colleagues die, baffled that the Administration was not able provide emergency supplies. But more really could have been done. 

In The New Yorker on Sept. 28, 2020, Jane Mayer wrote up the story of how Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson Max, recently graduated from Harvard, volunteered in March to help out with the White House Covid-19 Supply-Chain Task Force. He was shocked to discover that he and the 20 or so inexperienced volunteers were not there to help out, they were expected to be the task force, the front-line against the pandemic. Disgusted, knowing medical workers were having to wear garbage bags and reuse masks, within weeks he became an anonymous whistle-blower to Congress. Even though he had signed a non-disclosure agreement, Kennedy said, “‘If you see something that might be illegal, and cause thousands of civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.’ The Administration’s coronavirus response, he said, ‘was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of chaos.’ ”

Another story published in Stat, the medical newsletter, on January 31st, 2021, titled, “Trump officials actively lobbied to deny states money for vaccine rollout last fall,” is based on new information coming out now from former Trump aides. Trump’s people kept insisting that 200 million dollars they had already handed out to states hadn’t been spent yet, so they shouldn’t get any more. The states hadn’t spent it because the vaccines hadn’t arrived yet, but obviously that was a drop in the bucket of what is needed to administer vaccinations to 350,000 million people. 

The Sephardic Heritage program, based at the Jewish Federation of New Mexico under the leadership of Program Director Dr. Sara Koplik, is unique in assisting those around the world in getting Spain and now Portuguese passports for those whose families were forced out by the Inquisition of 1492 in Spain and then the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536. The program has saved the lives of peoples fleeing Venezuela, and is bringing additional kudos to New Mexico. 

Bailey has learned her husband’s family left Catalunya, Spain at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, then went to Portugal, then was forced to leave again, and moved to Constantinople, Turkey, and later moved within the Ottoman Empire to what would later become Romania. Following a pogram in 1906, half of fthe family left Romania and went back to Constantinople, and the other half joined the first Zionist settlement in Palestine, Rishon LeZion, which in 1882 was still part of the Ottoman Empire. At the end of World War I the British took over. The journey continues. 

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