May 1, 2020 // March 11, 2020
The Coronavirus, in Three Acts
Act One: The Boy Next Door
On March 11, actor Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis of coronavirus, apparently contracted while on a movie set in Australia. When I first read the news, I thought about this story from Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Blink. It’s about producer Brian Grazer, casting Hanks in his movie Splash, and subsequently as Astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13:
“He came in and read for the movie Splash,and right there, in the moment, I can tell you just what I saw," Grazer says. In that first instant, he knewHanks was special. "We read hundreds of people for that part, and other people were funnier than him. But they weren't as likable as him. I felt like I could live inside of him. I felt like his problems were problems I could relate to….”
My guess is that many of you have the same impression of Tom Hanks. If I asked you what he was like, you would say that he is decent and trustworthy and down-to-earth and funny. But you don't know him. You're not friends with him. You've only seen him in the movies, playing a wide range of different characters. Nonetheless, you've managed to extract something very meaningful about him from those thin slices of experience, and that impression has a powerful effect on how you experience Tom Hanks's movies. "Everybody said that they couldn't see Tom Hanks as an astronaut," Grazer says of his decision to cast Hanks in the hit movie Apollo 13."Well, I didn't know whether Tom Hanks was an astronaut. But I saw this as a movie about a spacecraft in jeopardy. And who does the world want to get back the most? Who does America want to save? Tom Hanks. We don't want to see him die. We like him too much."
Gladwell uses this story to describe the process of “thin-slicing,” the idea that “there are lots of situations (like the oral history interview) where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for more than a second or two, can tell you an awful lot.”
Don’t know Tom Hanks; never met him but yeah, we don’t want to see him die before his time. He does seem like a nice guy; he seems like your neighbor who always tosses you a friendly wave and a bright “How are ya?” as he gets in his SUV. Thankfully – good news: He and his wife Rita Wilson returned to Los Angeles on March 29, seemingly out of danger.
Act Two: The Hot Guy Next Door
Just days after we had absorbed the news about Hanks, we were hit with another blow: actor Idris Elba revealed his COVID-19 diagnosis. The August 2019 issue of Vanity Fair cover story on Elba is titled: “From England, With Love – How Idris Elba Became the Coolest Man in Hollywood.” From his roles on The Wire, The Office, Prometheus, Star Trek, Finding Dory, The Jungle Book, Pacific Rim, The Dark Tower and Luther, and other film, television and musical appearances, Elba has attracted legions of fans, among them – not surprising, due to his insane good looks, compelling accent and smoldering intelligence - legions of women.
Like Hanks, he seems like the kind of person you could relate to and feel comfortable getting to know. From the Vanity Fair article:
“Everything is a balance in life. I have to do the work because it’s a popular time for me, and it’s best to have that. But also: I’m madly in love with my wife and children.” They’re his priority, still: not fame, not persona, but the Canning Town boy become man, and the people he loves. “At home, I’m not famous: I’m me. And to my team and my family and the people that I work with every day when we build what we build, we’re not famous. You know what I mean? It’s day one every day.”
As was the case with Hanks, we don’t know Idris Elba. Never met him. But who doesn’t love that approach to life? Admittedly, we can only discern the man from his public persona, but even if we thin-slice those moments, we come out feeling positive about him, and we’re probably not wrong. He doesn’t feel angry or combative (think Christian Bale, Alec Baldwin, Russell Crowe. Although we love each and every one of them as an actor, we’re not exactly sure our personal impression of them is warm and welcoming.) Which is why we celebrated Elba’s announcement on April 1 that he was through his quarantine and emerging from the illness with no lasting ill effects.
Act Three: The Wife of the Cable News Anchor Next Door
According to numerous sources on the web, Cristina Cuomo, founder of Purist, was diagnosed with COVID-19. (Her husband, CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo, had announced his own diagnosis earlier but continued to broadcast from his home, in isolation. Their son, Mario, has since been diagnosed with the virus as well.) She said she’s treating the disease, which does not have an approved nor proven treatment yet, with natural remedies. As she stated on her blog,
“These vitamins, these supplements, these homeopathic remedies are all very helpful and this is a trial and error process….I am committed to this naturopathic route more than ever. Support the immune system, not suppress it.”
Look, where you stand on the role and efficacy of traditional western medicine, naturopathic medicine, or homeopathic, ayurvedic or any number of approaches to caring for your health is your decision. (Although if you’re thinking Naturopathy may be worth checking out to save some money, you may want to rethink that.) Cristina Cuomo is going the Naturopathic route and God bless. We hope she and her family recovers from the virus with no lasting effects.
But for us, the final, incredibly ironic twist to her recovery protocol as discussed on her blog was this: bleach baths. Yeah, exactly the kind of “disinfectant as medicine” practice President Trump was roundly, enthusiastically, and relentlessly pilloried for suggesting* - being done by a woman with a fairly large media spotlight on her: the wife of a prominent CNN Anchor. From her blog post, this is the explanation about adding the bleach bath to her naturopathic treatments, provide by her Naturopathic physician, Dr. Linda Lancaster:
“We want to neutralize heavy metals because they slow up the electromagnetic frequency of our cells, which is our energy field, and we need a good flow of energy. Clorox is sodium chloride—which is technically salt. Clorox is made by introducing an electric current to water and sodium chloride (saline) creating sodium hypochlorite. There is no danger in doing this. It is a simple naturopathic treatment that has been used for over 75 years to oxygenate the cells. Household bleach is not chlorine.”
We wont belabor this. We read Cristina’s entire and detailed blog post about her recovery but leave it you to decide how much you want to take in. You can read her Week 3 Post here.
Not surprisingly, her remarks did not go unnoticed. But she is not backing down. Our old friends at Vanity Fair covered Cristina's defense / statement regarding her Clorox bath in this piece – our favorite excerpt is below:
“If there’s a potential for something to work, why not investigate it?” Cristina Cuomo, April 24, 2020
Where have we read something like this before? Think. Think. Oh wait, here it is:
“So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.” Donald Trump, April 24, 2020
Even Vanity Fair acknowledges the kismet of these two statements emerging on the same day. Absent the President’s remarks, Ms. Cuomo might well have captured the crazy headline of the day in the media. Well, she may have. We’ll never know now, will we?
By the way, we never saw this follow up question posted in all the ranting and raving about the “inject Clorox into your veins” recommendation the President made to the world, excerpted from the same press conference transcript (TWAN emphasis our own):
Q But I — just, can I ask about — the President mentioned the idea of cleaners, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol you mentioned. There’s no scenario that that could be injected into a person, is there? I mean --
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: No, I’m here to talk about the findings that we had in the study. We won’t do that within that lab and our lab. So --
THE PRESIDENT: It wouldn’t be through injection. We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work. But it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object.
Back to Cristina:
“Pooling anecdotal evidence and sharing methods for recovery are important. Why? Communication is all we’ve got right now.” (TWAN emphasis.)
Actually, no, it’s not. We have a lot more than communication going on right now. Below are any number of links you can hop on to read more about the extensive research to develop vaccines for COVID-19, that has been going on for some time now:
From the NIH, March 16, 2020:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-trial-investigational-vaccine-covid-19-begins
From Science Daily, April 2, 2020:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200402144508.htm
From the World Health Organization, April 13, 2020:
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/13-04-2020-public-statement-for-collaboration-on-covid-19-vaccine-development
From Oxford University, April 28, 2020:
https://www.biospace.com/article/oxford-university-s-jenner-institute-ahead-of-the-curve-on-covid-19-vaccine/
Another from Oxford, calling out research at the following places:
CanSino Biologicsand the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology(Phase II.) U.S. companies: Inovio Pharmaceuticalsand Moderna;also The University of Pittsburgh.https://www.biospace.com/article/research-roundup-another-promising-covid-19-vaccine-and-more/
Scientific American, April 29, 2020:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genetic-engineering-could-make-a-covid-19-vaccine-in-months-rather-than-years1/
You get the idea. Cristina can do whatever she likes regarding her own health but this is where we all should have been outraged. She should apologize to every researcher working tirelessly for her bone-headed remark about communication being "all we’ve got." And while she's at it, to the rest of the world for suggesting** to people that they should add bleach to their bathwater as part of her COVID-19 treatment.
---------
Those asterisks: Let's apply this standard equally shall we? If the President made a suggestion, so did Cristina. (TWAN emphasis our own.)
*If by “suggesting,” you mean the following: “But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.”
** If by "suggesting" you mean: "After reading these articles, and consulting with a few other people who have been doing the therapeutic baths for years like my friend Taya Thurman who texted me, she has been taking the water and bleach baths once a week for 20 years and trusts in the efficacy of the baths, as well as two other medical doctors. One, Dr. Frank Lipman, a functional medical doctor, told me that while he doesn’t recommend this bath to his patients, the recommended dilution does not pose any harm. Since I had no sense of smell, no issues with asthma, and no open wounds that it could potentially sting, I climbed into my bathtub."
On March 11, actor Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis of coronavirus, apparently contracted while on a movie set in Australia. When I first read the news, I thought about this story from Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Blink. It’s about producer Brian Grazer, casting Hanks in his movie Splash, and subsequently as Astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13:
“He came in and read for the movie Splash,and right there, in the moment, I can tell you just what I saw," Grazer says. In that first instant, he knewHanks was special. "We read hundreds of people for that part, and other people were funnier than him. But they weren't as likable as him. I felt like I could live inside of him. I felt like his problems were problems I could relate to….”
My guess is that many of you have the same impression of Tom Hanks. If I asked you what he was like, you would say that he is decent and trustworthy and down-to-earth and funny. But you don't know him. You're not friends with him. You've only seen him in the movies, playing a wide range of different characters. Nonetheless, you've managed to extract something very meaningful about him from those thin slices of experience, and that impression has a powerful effect on how you experience Tom Hanks's movies. "Everybody said that they couldn't see Tom Hanks as an astronaut," Grazer says of his decision to cast Hanks in the hit movie Apollo 13."Well, I didn't know whether Tom Hanks was an astronaut. But I saw this as a movie about a spacecraft in jeopardy. And who does the world want to get back the most? Who does America want to save? Tom Hanks. We don't want to see him die. We like him too much."
Gladwell uses this story to describe the process of “thin-slicing,” the idea that “there are lots of situations (like the oral history interview) where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for more than a second or two, can tell you an awful lot.”
Don’t know Tom Hanks; never met him but yeah, we don’t want to see him die before his time. He does seem like a nice guy; he seems like your neighbor who always tosses you a friendly wave and a bright “How are ya?” as he gets in his SUV. Thankfully – good news: He and his wife Rita Wilson returned to Los Angeles on March 29, seemingly out of danger.
Act Two: The Hot Guy Next Door
Just days after we had absorbed the news about Hanks, we were hit with another blow: actor Idris Elba revealed his COVID-19 diagnosis. The August 2019 issue of Vanity Fair cover story on Elba is titled: “From England, With Love – How Idris Elba Became the Coolest Man in Hollywood.” From his roles on The Wire, The Office, Prometheus, Star Trek, Finding Dory, The Jungle Book, Pacific Rim, The Dark Tower and Luther, and other film, television and musical appearances, Elba has attracted legions of fans, among them – not surprising, due to his insane good looks, compelling accent and smoldering intelligence - legions of women.
Like Hanks, he seems like the kind of person you could relate to and feel comfortable getting to know. From the Vanity Fair article:
“Everything is a balance in life. I have to do the work because it’s a popular time for me, and it’s best to have that. But also: I’m madly in love with my wife and children.” They’re his priority, still: not fame, not persona, but the Canning Town boy become man, and the people he loves. “At home, I’m not famous: I’m me. And to my team and my family and the people that I work with every day when we build what we build, we’re not famous. You know what I mean? It’s day one every day.”
As was the case with Hanks, we don’t know Idris Elba. Never met him. But who doesn’t love that approach to life? Admittedly, we can only discern the man from his public persona, but even if we thin-slice those moments, we come out feeling positive about him, and we’re probably not wrong. He doesn’t feel angry or combative (think Christian Bale, Alec Baldwin, Russell Crowe. Although we love each and every one of them as an actor, we’re not exactly sure our personal impression of them is warm and welcoming.) Which is why we celebrated Elba’s announcement on April 1 that he was through his quarantine and emerging from the illness with no lasting ill effects.
Act Three: The Wife of the Cable News Anchor Next Door
According to numerous sources on the web, Cristina Cuomo, founder of Purist, was diagnosed with COVID-19. (Her husband, CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo, had announced his own diagnosis earlier but continued to broadcast from his home, in isolation. Their son, Mario, has since been diagnosed with the virus as well.) She said she’s treating the disease, which does not have an approved nor proven treatment yet, with natural remedies. As she stated on her blog,
“These vitamins, these supplements, these homeopathic remedies are all very helpful and this is a trial and error process….I am committed to this naturopathic route more than ever. Support the immune system, not suppress it.”
Look, where you stand on the role and efficacy of traditional western medicine, naturopathic medicine, or homeopathic, ayurvedic or any number of approaches to caring for your health is your decision. (Although if you’re thinking Naturopathy may be worth checking out to save some money, you may want to rethink that.) Cristina Cuomo is going the Naturopathic route and God bless. We hope she and her family recovers from the virus with no lasting effects.
But for us, the final, incredibly ironic twist to her recovery protocol as discussed on her blog was this: bleach baths. Yeah, exactly the kind of “disinfectant as medicine” practice President Trump was roundly, enthusiastically, and relentlessly pilloried for suggesting* - being done by a woman with a fairly large media spotlight on her: the wife of a prominent CNN Anchor. From her blog post, this is the explanation about adding the bleach bath to her naturopathic treatments, provide by her Naturopathic physician, Dr. Linda Lancaster:
“We want to neutralize heavy metals because they slow up the electromagnetic frequency of our cells, which is our energy field, and we need a good flow of energy. Clorox is sodium chloride—which is technically salt. Clorox is made by introducing an electric current to water and sodium chloride (saline) creating sodium hypochlorite. There is no danger in doing this. It is a simple naturopathic treatment that has been used for over 75 years to oxygenate the cells. Household bleach is not chlorine.”
We wont belabor this. We read Cristina’s entire and detailed blog post about her recovery but leave it you to decide how much you want to take in. You can read her Week 3 Post here.
Not surprisingly, her remarks did not go unnoticed. But she is not backing down. Our old friends at Vanity Fair covered Cristina's defense / statement regarding her Clorox bath in this piece – our favorite excerpt is below:
“If there’s a potential for something to work, why not investigate it?” Cristina Cuomo, April 24, 2020
Where have we read something like this before? Think. Think. Oh wait, here it is:
“So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.” Donald Trump, April 24, 2020
Even Vanity Fair acknowledges the kismet of these two statements emerging on the same day. Absent the President’s remarks, Ms. Cuomo might well have captured the crazy headline of the day in the media. Well, she may have. We’ll never know now, will we?
By the way, we never saw this follow up question posted in all the ranting and raving about the “inject Clorox into your veins” recommendation the President made to the world, excerpted from the same press conference transcript (TWAN emphasis our own):
Q But I — just, can I ask about — the President mentioned the idea of cleaners, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol you mentioned. There’s no scenario that that could be injected into a person, is there? I mean --
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: No, I’m here to talk about the findings that we had in the study. We won’t do that within that lab and our lab. So --
THE PRESIDENT: It wouldn’t be through injection. We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work. But it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object.
Back to Cristina:
“Pooling anecdotal evidence and sharing methods for recovery are important. Why? Communication is all we’ve got right now.” (TWAN emphasis.)
Actually, no, it’s not. We have a lot more than communication going on right now. Below are any number of links you can hop on to read more about the extensive research to develop vaccines for COVID-19, that has been going on for some time now:
From the NIH, March 16, 2020:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-trial-investigational-vaccine-covid-19-begins
From Science Daily, April 2, 2020:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200402144508.htm
From the World Health Organization, April 13, 2020:
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/13-04-2020-public-statement-for-collaboration-on-covid-19-vaccine-development
From Oxford University, April 28, 2020:
https://www.biospace.com/article/oxford-university-s-jenner-institute-ahead-of-the-curve-on-covid-19-vaccine/
Another from Oxford, calling out research at the following places:
CanSino Biologicsand the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology(Phase II.) U.S. companies: Inovio Pharmaceuticalsand Moderna;also The University of Pittsburgh.https://www.biospace.com/article/research-roundup-another-promising-covid-19-vaccine-and-more/
Scientific American, April 29, 2020:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genetic-engineering-could-make-a-covid-19-vaccine-in-months-rather-than-years1/
You get the idea. Cristina can do whatever she likes regarding her own health but this is where we all should have been outraged. She should apologize to every researcher working tirelessly for her bone-headed remark about communication being "all we’ve got." And while she's at it, to the rest of the world for suggesting** to people that they should add bleach to their bathwater as part of her COVID-19 treatment.
---------
Those asterisks: Let's apply this standard equally shall we? If the President made a suggestion, so did Cristina. (TWAN emphasis our own.)
*If by “suggesting,” you mean the following: “But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.”
** If by "suggesting" you mean: "After reading these articles, and consulting with a few other people who have been doing the therapeutic baths for years like my friend Taya Thurman who texted me, she has been taking the water and bleach baths once a week for 20 years and trusts in the efficacy of the baths, as well as two other medical doctors. One, Dr. Frank Lipman, a functional medical doctor, told me that while he doesn’t recommend this bath to his patients, the recommended dilution does not pose any harm. Since I had no sense of smell, no issues with asthma, and no open wounds that it could potentially sting, I climbed into my bathtub."