A Long Overdue Memorial Day

One of the most terrible tragedies of the Jim Crow era occurred 100 years ago tonight in my home state. The Tulsa Race Massacre was so terrible that there was a prolonged effort to bury its memory: the carnage was immediately rebranded as a “riot,” an estimated 10,000 black residents lost their homes and livelihoods with no compensation whatsoever, mass graves were concealed, a death toll was never recorded, and the city of Tulsa refused to formally acknowledge the event until 1998. Only then did researchers and community activists begin to piece together the true story of what happened, and in the context of our current racial reckoning, that story is finally being told in detail across many news outlets and documentaries. 107-year-old survivor Viola Fletcher gave a moving testimony to Congress, and though it’s several decades too late, the nationwide attention has been a cathartic experience for many communities who feel the weight of racial injustice that lingers today.

However, this spotlight is not without its detractors: earlier this month, governors of Oklahoma and Texas signed legislation aimed to ban critical race theory from being taught in schools. Aside from creating a culture of fear in classrooms, the measures are backward and historically wrongheaded – I say this from experience as an alumnus of Oklahoma public schools during the 2000s. My 9th grade Oklahoma history class didn’t explicitly discuss what happened in Tulsa in 1921; rather, I first heard of the incident from the required reading, a 1994 textbook that referred to it as the “Tulsa Race Riot” and focused on the inciting incident to cast blame on both sides. With similar attention to “both sides,” my 11th grade U.S. history course featured a mock debate between northern abolitionists and pro-slavery southerners, in which half the class was instructed to defend the economic benefits and states’ rights arguments of the southern states leading up to the Civil War. The verbiage of the Oklahoma bill forbids topics that evoke “discomfort, guilt or distress on account of their race or sex,” but I can imagine an African American student in that classroom environment feeling very discomforted and distressed.

In my eyes, intentionally smoothing over history is far more dangerous than introducing uncomfortable topics to children. It was a travesty that the trajectory of America’s racial history was presented to me as ‘slavery was bad, the Civil War fixed it, lingering racism led to segregation, then the civil rights movement solved everything.’ The massacre in Tulsa was, of course, part of a larger white supremacist movement post-Reconstruction; there were a number of devastating attacks on African American communities in Wilmington NC, Springfield IL, Elaine AR, and other places both north and south. Heinous acts of domestic terrorism carried out with the complicity of state and local governments who did not protect even the most basic rights of black citizens. I hope that these suppressed histories continue to be told, conservative sensibilities be damned. Viola Fletcher doesn’t want to “leave this world without justice,” which beyond telling the story of Black Wall Street in Tulsa would require a societal acknowledgement of the complete legacy of Jim Crow. That recognition is long overdue. *

Ruins of Greenwood District after the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre, American National Red Cross Photograph Collection, June 1921

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* The closest we got to such a recognition was perhaps in 1968, when the Kerner Report advised the Johnson administration that the United States was moving toward a segregated, unequal system wherein black ghettoes were plagued by generational poverty and unfair disadvantages in employment, home ownership, policing, infrastructure, and education, to name a few. The Nixon administration went in a different direction, and we’re still contending with the same problems 50 years later.

Vaccine Freedom

After getting my second dose of the Moderna vaccine a few days ago, I felt an instant surge of 5G course through my veins – that is, if the G stands for gratitude. For all practical purposes, I should have been one of the last to receive the vaccine: I’m a young bachelor who works with a small number of young-to-middle-aged men in a somewhat socially-distanced setting, and I already caught the virus in September. My vaccine opportunity was made possible in part by the vaccine hesitancy of my neighbors, as the local pharmacy could not fill all of its available appointments. It was completely free and as easy as a phone call and an hour in a supermarket pharmacy. Two shots and a only a dull headache later, I am fully vaccinated against all known variants of the coronavirus.

In truth, this opportunity was made possible by the federal government’s aggressive vaccine rollout. For a down payment of about $9 billion (most of which went into Moderna’s mRNA-based vaccine), the U.S. government secured first access to hundreds of millions of doses, enough for all residents to be vaccinated at no cost. India is suffering a devastating runaway outbreak, only receiving leftover vaccine doses that were unclaimed by countries rich enough to prepay. Likewise, Brazil’s struggle to contain their COVID-19 variant, which has a much higher mortality rate in children, is hampered by a lack of vaccines available. Ethically, high-risk people in these countries deserve to be vaccinated well before me, but there’s no system presently in place to redistribute doses. I accepted the vaccine when it was my turn, acknowledging my extreme privilege living in a wealthy nation.

Yet only 31% of Texans have been fully vaccinated, lagging slightly behind the national average of 36%. And vaccination rates are slowing, a sign that many Americans are not making arrangements to get vaccinated. A surge in weekend, drive-through vaccination events should help, along with incentives ranging from free Uber/Lyft rides to free beer. But this doesn’t move the needle with the quarter of Americans who say they refuse to be vaccinated, no pun intended. Even though we live in the most well-resourced country in the world, where over 100 million people were already vaccinated in the largest free clinical trial, with a plethora of public media resources explaining the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, a significant fraction of the population will exercise their ‘freedom’ and likely decline the free ticket out of this pandemic.

For the life of me, I don’t understand it.

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For an interesting dive into the history of vaccine production/distribution and how it foments some of the vaccine inequity today, I recommend this piece from NPR.

New Normals

There’s been a lot of talk about a “new normal” as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, one characterized by germophobia, physical distancing, remote work, and a reluctance to gather socially. The hesitancy may go on indefinitely; even though all Americans over 16 have access to a free vaccine, a large portion of the population will opt to go unprotected. It is truly confounding that those most staunchly anti-vaccine are likely living their full-contact lives, while many vaccinated people still take precautions. And that events will be limited until herd immunity is achieved, despite that practically no one in the herd will be concerned about catching the virus here in a few short weeks. But I digress.

The new normal we should be talking about, in my view, is living with the irreversible changes brought by human activity. Last week, NOAA published new 30-year averages for temperature, precipitation, and other meteorological variables. To no one’s surprise, the new average temperatures reflecting 1991-2020 are substantially higher than the previous figures reflecting 1981-2010, showing a warming consistent with global temperature increases. The last two decades have each seen nearly a 0.5 °F rise in average national temperature, accounting for over half of the total 1.7 °F temperature increase since 1900. Mathematically, this means that the 2010s were 1.5 °F warmer than the 1980s, the 2000s 1.5 °F warmer than the 1970s, onward and upward. Moreover, climatic trends that began around 50 years ago are exacerbated in this latest update: it’s becoming warmer and wetter across most of the country, and much hotter and drier in the desert southwest.

Link to Washington Post article

While global warming-driven climate change has seemed like a distant threat in the past, the 2010s represents a turning point in which the issue became imminently tangible. Whether it’s the proliferation of news media or simply an increased environmental interest worldwide, there have been a number of stories documenting startling changes in our Earth systems. Calving ice sheets, habitat loss, industrial spills and plastic waste pollution, natural disasters, water shortages, and more are broadcast with viral imagery (often sensationally, but that’s effective) and discussed in the proper context of historical records. I recently watched Chasing Coral, a shocking documentary showing in real-time as major sections of the Great Barrier Reef died over the span of a few months. The fact that 1 °C of ocean warming could cause a loss of over 90% of coral reefs is an alarming testament to the fragility of our natural balance, and I fear the ripple effects across all ecosystems due to what once seemed like a minor perturbation in climate.

Moving forward, I want to better advocate for Earth-conscious policies and causes, rather than simply be a background observer as I have been for the past decade. The Paris Climate Accord, which seemed proactive at its nascence in 2015, can now be viewed as a no-brainer reaction to an existential threat and frankly may not go far enough to push developed countries to innovate a sustainable future. I regret my decision in 2012 to work all summer instead of learning scuba and seeing the coral reefs of the South Pacific when they were near full strength, not foreseeing that irreversible damage would be done in a few short years. I do not want to make the same mistake to miss Earth’s other disappearing treasures: indigenous villages and cultural enclaves assimilating into modern society, coastal cities and coral atolls sinking into the sea, glaciers melting and rainforests burning and previously habitable land desertifying. Even the pristine dark sky is vanishing due to the multiplying satellites in orbit, and an unlit sky is perhaps the most transfixing view on Earth. Perhaps an individual can’t slow the massive forces of change, but a little more worldly observation would suit us all, since what we enjoy about today may not be here forever.

Inside the Hand Sanitizer Industry

Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been a huge boom in new hand sanitizer products, from companies large and small, new and old, honest and dishonest, competent and incompetent. The onus has fallen to the consumer to differentiate between reputable and disreputable labels, a tough challenge for anyone, even for me, a quality control engineer for a company that manufactures hand sanitizer. I intended to write this post months ago, as it only took a few weeks in the industry for me to realize several sources of skullduggery. From toxic ingredients to tequila smell to yellow discoloration, I’ve seen it all, which is why this long overdue breakdown of hazards is still relevant and necessary.

You may be asking, “Where is the FDA’s leadership? Isn’t it their responsibility to ensure safety and quality in this industry?” While hand sanitizer is classed as an over-the-counter topical pharmaceutical under the FDA’s regulatory umbrella, the FDA does not have the bandwidth to rigorously monitor products from all 2,500+ firms that registered to manufacture hand sanitizer since March 2020. The agency released guidances (many of which were nonbinding) for new manufacturers to follow the recommendations of the WHO and CDC to produce a liquid sanitizer with limits on certain toxic impurities. Then they took a reactive approach to regulation, responding to only the most serious problem of 17 fatal methanol poisonings with a ban on imports from Mexico.

As you might expect, this hands-off approach did not create a culture of self-enforcement among firms desperate to claim a share of the competitive new market. First, an overwhelming majority of products contain thickening agents, disregarding the FDA’s instructions for liquid sanitizers. This isn’t a problem in and of itself, as most thickening agents are safe and FDA-approved. However, the addition of these artificial ingredients makes many labels that claim a “100% natural” product misleading. Worse yet, the carbomer-type binders (which I prefer in my formulas as a low-residue, odorless ingredient) often introduce side reactions that form a yellow tint in the presence of aldehyde impurities or an unpleasant amine smell when paired with certain neutralizers and excessive heat or sunlight exposure.

This leads to a second, more harmful problem. The shortage of high-grade ethanol and isopropanol available led many manufacturers to use lower grades of ethanol, which the FDA authorized provided that certain purity standards were met. A certificate of analysis should accompany all alcohol deliveries, but these analyses often leave out critical lab tests for one or more of what I’d consider the “big five” contaminants: methanol, benzene, 1-propanol, acetals/aldehydes, and inorganic residues. Even with lab analyses that exceeded limits in one or more categories, numerous alcohol suppliers misrepresented their product as “food grade” or “USP spec” to unknowing customers, who parroted the false purity claims down the supply chain. Intake quality control has been a significant challenge for me, as it can be difficult to obtain certificates of analysis that meet all standards and actually reflect the exact batch that is delivered.

The FDA’s silence on contaminants other than methanol has been deafening. In its place, Valisure, an independent lab, published a study analyzing hand sanitizers for a range of unwanted impurities. The lab identified violations of FDA recommendations across the board, a strong example of the lack of regulatory accountability. Most alarmingly, 23% of the brands studied exceeded allowable limits of benzene, one of the earliest known carcinogens. The worst offender, ArtNaturals, has shown no intention of voluntarily recalling any of its millions of units sold, even after the lab revealed a staggering 16 ppm of benzene (compared to the emergency use allowance of 2 ppm and OSHA maximum exposure limit of 0.1 ppm). Until the FDA acts decisively to demand recalls or shut down production facilities within the U.S., I expect companies to continue to pump substandard sanitizer products into a market that is already littered with known hazards.

It’s not all doom and gloom – there are many high-quality hand sanitizers out there (perhaps up to 77% of the market, if the Valisure study is representative). They just require some discernment to find. Here are my consumer recommendations if you still wish to purchase hand sanitizer, but discerningly:

• Check the active ingredient. The FDA only allows three active ingredients: ethyl alcohol or ethanol, isopropyl alcohol or isopropanol, and benzalkonium chloride (see footnote). I recommend a 70% alcohol-by-volume product to insure against dosing errors or vapor losses during packaging. Any other ingredients are not recognized to have any effect against pathogens.
• Look for clear, untinted sanitizers. Yellow discoloration likely indicates elevated concentrations of ketones/aldehydes, which have an unpleasant odor similar to paint thinner. Fun-colored dyes may be present to mask an unwanted discoloration, and they end up as residue on your skin once the alcohol and water evaporate.
• Bigger brands are generally safer. Established companies are more familiar with the rules surrounding OTC pharmaceutical production, and they were more likely to have supply contracts with reputable sources before last year’s demand spike and supply disruptions.
• Be careful with gels and fragrances. To minimize sticky or foul-smelling residue from gels, I would only trust thickeners listed as carbomer, carbopol, or acryl acrylate crosspolymer on the drug facts label. Fragrances also leave residue on your hands, and industrial fragrances may not be produced to the same rigorous sanitary standards.
• If a label has typos, weird capitalization or formatting issues, avoid like the plague! Chances are the same level of care went into determining that all ingredients were sourced to the requisite purity standards and blended in a proper manner.

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An example of poor quality control from a third-party hand sanitizer manufacturer

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Note: Benzalkonium chloride is a high strength mutagenic disinfectant. When improperly dosed, it can be toxic to human cells. Widely used as an industrial disinfecting agent, benzalkonium chloride has also sparked debates about antibiotic resistance in which some call for a decrease in its use. While undeniably effective in the right quantities, I cannot recommend it over alcohol products.