Rant #2,705: Salesman

OK, let’s talk about this right at the top.
 
The Yankees’ Gerrit Cole has contracted COVID-19, so he is out of action for at least 10 days.
 
Now the tracing has to start, and since he really showed no signs of the virus over the past few days, you just know that the third outbreak to hit the Yankees this season is imminent, and that some players, coaches and other management types might also be shut down for a few days as a precaution.
 
The Yankees are one of the teams that reached the required 85 percent threshold set by Major League Baseball for teams getting a coronavirus vaccine, meaning that they were given pretty much free reign in the dugout and clubhouse to do what they wanted.
 
Yankee Stadium is in the middle of the South Bronx, one of the New York neighborhoods where vaccination rates are extremely low, and as a public service, the stadium became a vaccination destination for the community, dispensing one vaccine to whoever wanted it.
 
Many of the players took advantage of this service themselves, and received their shot right at their workplace.
 
There is no word on whether Cole was vaccinated, and if he was, what vaccine he took.
 
But in the other two instances that hit the team, the affected personnel, less one of those who contracted the virus, received the vaccine that was given at their workplace—
 
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
 
Case closed on this.
 
Yes, I am no doctor, but it does not take that level of expertise to see that even in these small sample sizes, the one-dose vaccine is the true culprit in what we are going through now, simply because the well-meaning—yet dim-witted—people who received this shot thought they were protecting themselves--and others--against this virus, but what they got shot into their arms is akin to maybe a level above getting an allergy shot.
 
The one-dose shot doesn’t work as well as the two-dose shots against the virus, and it certainly doesn’t work well against the delta variant.
 
How these people could actually believe that a single-dose shot could be as good as the double-dose shots available is beyond my comprehension, and I guess even multi-million-dollar ballplayers are not above this utter stupidity.
 
‘Nuf said about this for now.
 
Let’s talk about something else as we move into this lazy August day.
 
I am sure you must have heard over the weekend that the ultimate TV pitchman, Ron Popeil, died at age 86.
 
This was the guy who took P.T. Barnum’s phrase “there is a sucker born every minute” and ran with it to the bank, hawking everything from items that diced and sliced potatoes and vegetables and soft-boiled eggs with ease to “The Pocket Fisherman,” an all-in-one gadget that allowed even the most novice fisherman to catch the big fish like the pros do.
 
For about seven decades, his various companies—including Ronco and Popeil—hawked everything to make life easier for those purchasing them.
 
Whether they really worked or not to the level that was proposed on the TV commercials was open to speculation, but he knew that television could deliver his product to the masses, and like a modern-day snake-oil salesman, he sold his wares on the electronic media for decades.
 
Supposedly, his father was a minor inventor, tooling around with gadgets including one that chopped various items into different slices with a single push, and his son picked up the inventor frenzy, coming up with other “time-saving" inventions to make life easier for everyone.
 
Was he a modern hawker, selling tonic to cure all your ills and then pulling out of town as fast as possible to avoid retribution when the buyer found that the “magic elixir” didn’t do very much to cure his stomach pain or his headaches?
 
Funny, we have people around today who make claims about certain things that we also should have many doubts about, that we should question at the moment they open their mouths, claiming that their own “magic elixir” will do the job it is intended for.
 
Yes, it is sort of ironic that Popeil passed just at the time the modern snake oil salesmen trying to sell one coronavirus vaccine or another has dumped on us all of their supposed wisdom.
 
But like what Popeil sold, I really wonder whether these concoctions do as well as advertised … one dose versus two doses in particular.
 
I guess in a strange way, you can look at the single-dose vaccines as the strange bedfellows of the Popeil empire, while the double doses are more of the real thing, in a way.
 
The single doses save time and give you peace of mind, just like Popeil’s Slice-O-Matic or whatever it was called did, but is it really the best way to handle the problem at hand?
 
I will let you 'dice and slice" the answer to that question yourself.