2-3-21

The Pitt News

T h e in de p e n d e n t st ude nt ne w spap e r of t he University of Pittsburgh | PIttnews.com | february 3, 2021 ­| Volume 111 | Issue 59

SHOT OF HOPE See story on page 2

Cover by Rachhana Baliga | Staff Photographer

News ‘Surreal’: Student pharmacists administer COVID-19 vaccines Dunkin opens in North Oakland; COVID-19 misinformation research pittnews.com

Punya Bhasin Staff Writer

Jake Murawski administered his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in December at UPMC Presbyterian, making him the first pharmacy intern in Pennsylvania to administer a COVID-19 vaccine. Murawski was “nervous� while injecting the shot, but trusted his training. “I just wanted to make sure I did it right because there were a lot of cameras and eyes on me,� Murawski, a second-year pharmacy student, said. “The whole time I was just thinking about putting the needle in the arm correctly, applying what I learned and making sure it was done properly.�

The experience, Murawski said, was unexpected so early in his pharmacy education, and he only found out he would get to do it the day before. “It felt amazing, and it was very surprising,�

Murawski said. “I was really shocked that I was able to do it that day, because, I mean, no one before me at our school had been able or allowed to administer vaccines.�

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf issued a waiver in December allowing pharmacy interns to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to those who are 18 years of age or older under the “direct, immediate and personal supervision� of a licensed pharmacist who has an authorization to administer injectable medications. Numerous pharmacy students at Pitt have used this new rule to administer vaccines at UPMC hospitals and clinics, including one Pitt hosted last week that vaccinated 800 health care professionals across Pittsburgh.

In order to administer this vaccine, Murawski had to undergo roughly 30 hours of training. He said the training consisted of a CPR certification, an American Pharmacists Association immu-

nization certification and physical training with different vaccine techniques using saline solution injections. “The work and training was grueling,� Murawski said. “But it was completely worth it because I got to do something I would have had to wait two years to do.�

For other pharmacy interns, like Amanda Kan, administering coronavirus vaccines this early in her education reinforced her goal of becoming a pharmacist. Kan, a second-year pharmacy student, administered her first COVID-19 vaccine on Jan. 12 at UPMC Presbyterian. “When I heard the news that we would be able to vaccinate people, I was really excited because I thought it would give me more chances to practice and learn before actually becoming a full pharmacist,� Kan said. “After giving the shot myself and seeing behind the scenes, it boosted my confidence in my abilities to continue on this path.�

A common thread Kan noticed among multiple patients is that they were nervous about getting a shot. She said this is a sentiment she could relate to well. “I’ve had many patients who are afraid of getting the vaccine for many reasons, one of which being they are afraid of needles,� Kan said. “I think I am in a unique position because I also get nervous with vaccinations, so I am able to better guide them and calm them down during the process.�

Kan added that she feels lucky to have gotten this experience and is excited to help during the pandemic.

“This experience has been incredibly rewarding, just because in the past, pharmacy students weren’t able to vaccinate people until after graduation,� Kan said. “While I didn’t expect to be given this opportunity super early, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to help out and further my learning experience.�

Pharmacy interns, such as second-year pharmacy students Alex Aubin and Jaccie Hisashima, have also given each other vaccines. After practicing giving the vaccine to each other in training sessions, Aubin ended up administering his first vaccine on Hisashima on Jan. 20 at Giant Eagle. Aubin said he thinks he did a good job and wasn’t too nervous while injecting the shot. “I think it went really well. I drew no blood, and Jaccie didn’t seem to experience any adverse side effects,� Aubin said. “It was over before I knew it — stuck a Band-Aid on her and she continued the rest of her shift like normal.�

Hisashima said she was nervous to be the first person Aubin was vaccinating, but she did her best not to project her nerves onto him. “Truthfully, I was a little nervous but did everything in my power not to show or portray it, just because I didn’t want to make him more nervous,� Hisashima said. “The thought of finally receiving the vaccine also loomed large in my mind, so as I continued to encourage him I was also indirectly encouraging myself to receive the vaccine.�

Murawski, who has given more than 100 vac-

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‘Honor them with your presence’: A look into the past, future of Soldiers & Sailors

Colm Slevin Staff Writer

John McCabe has a special tie to Oakland’s Soldiers & Sailors Museum — his photograph is one of about one thousand items on display. The photo features him during his time as a military police officer in Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War. “It’s actually me in a photograph,” McCabe, the president of Soldiers & Sailors, said. “I'm working and I have a dog latched onto my arm, because I have protection on and I'm fighting with him.”

McCabe said the museum — which is operated by the nonprofit Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum Trust, Inc. — was leased from Allegheny County in 2000. The artifacts are all owned by the corporation.

“It's a huge building. It's an old building, and it needs a lot of TLC,” McCabe said.

“So, the leadership at the time recognized the need for funding, and the county recognized the fact that it couldn't find it the way that it should be to maintain it, the way that it should be, to make the improvements to it.”

Soldiers & Sailors has started to make noticeable changes since then. Tim Ness — the vice president of Soldiers & Sailors, and a Pitt alumnus who graduated in 2000 — said one of the largest changes he’s seen is that the museum is more welcoming to students and the public.

“When I was at Pitt as a history major, this building right here on the middle of campus, nobody went into it, they had keep off the grass signs out front,” Ness said.

“That all changed once the trust took over.

We wanted people to come in, and one of the first things we did was invite Pitt students to use our front lawn just to show that there was life here.”

Part of this initiative is giving the lawn outside the museum, where students often sit during the warmer parts of the year, a major face-lift. McCabe said this project, which has been in the works since 2009, includes adding a statue called “America’s Defenders.” Its purpose is to honor current soldiers and veterans from the past two decades. McCabe said adding this statue to the

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lawn is where the idea of updating the entire lawn came from.

“It's in honor of our current generation of veterans fighting the war on terrorism,” McCabe said. “It would be reflective of their uniform and soldiers that are in Afghanistan and in Iraq or that have been for the last 20 years. That statue was actually in the process of being sculpted and turned into a bronze statue.”

McCabe said the lawn update will also include adding new ramps into the front doors to make the building more accessible.

Currently the museum isn’t handicap accessible.

“We'll have ramps that lead into the front doors so literally anybody can get in and ac-

ting on the lawn and just hanging out with friends or just eating together before it got too cold.”

But it’s what’s inside the museum that makes it stand out. Soldiers & Sailors has over 10,000 donated artifacts, including seven medals of honor on display from western Pa. soldiers. Of these 10,000, about 1,000 are on display to the public. Ness said these medals — the highest and most prestigious military decoration — are a rare sight.

“They are truly a national treasure,” Ness said. “You know, you can go your whole life and not see a single Medal of Honor, and we have seven in our collection ranging in Civil War through the Vietnam War.” Ness added that one of the bright sides of

Soldiers & Sailors is a war museum home to more than 10,000 donated artifacts from western Pennsylvanian soldiers who served from the Civil War to the Iraq War. Kaycee Orwig senior staff photographer cess it like you should be able to,” McCabe said. “Because of the age of the building we haven't been required to to maintain it or make improvements for ADA requirements.”

Selina Jin, an undecided first-year, said she enjoys sitting with her friends on the lawn when the weather is nice. Jin said she went to a STEM event at Soldiers & Sailors, and that was where she first saw the campus.

“In 2019 I went to a STEM camp at Soldiers & Sailors,” Jin said. “It was a really beautiful museum, and I loved the campus. Many of my fond memories are of sit-

the COVID-19 pandemic is that Lisa Petitta, the museum’s collections manager, has had time to create an online artifacts catalog.

They’ve also begun to create a virtual tour of the museum which will be posted on their website.

Notable figures like Nelson Mandela, Donald Trump, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have enjoyed the inside of the hall as well, according to McCabe. A part of Soldiers & Sailors’ history is highlighted by the events they host such as weddings, banquets and University events. This also makes up about a third of the corporation's revenue.

February 3, 2021

“The majority of times it's because we have individuals like Obama or Trump that are pursuing their initiatives and they're campaigning and they're reaching out into the cities, looking for places to hold their gatherings, and we're often on that shortlist,” McCabe said. “So that's very significant for us because that's good revenue for us also.”

Soldiers & Sailors isn’t just trying to attract high-profile figures, though. McCabe said to attract more students after Nordenberg Hall was built, the museum started an annual tradition of showing the movie “Silence of the Lambs,” which was partially filmed in the museum, to first-year students in October. While the museum did not show the movie this year because of COVID-19, McCabe said he hopes next year to open it to first-years and sophomores.

Like the movie night, Soldiers & Sailors hasn’t been able to host many of their normal fundraisers in-person, including for Memorial Day. Instead, Ness said they held a virtual ceremony with a color guard and asked the public to send in videos of them speaking about the importance of their service.

The corporation also had to switch up their Veteran’s Day celebrations in November due to the pandemic. The museum asked people to donate money in honor of a veteran and the museum would place a flag in their honor with the goal of filling the lawn. While this was the first year they filled the lawn with flags, Ness said the corporation hopes to make it a tradition.

“We never dreamed it would get as big as it was,” Ness said. “Which is encouraging and speaks to this region's love of their veterans, and … it was really heartwarming and then that Veterans Day evening with, we had luminaries with the building all lit up.”

Filling the lawn was not only a successful fundraiser for Soldiers & Sailors — according to McCabe, it was also a highly impactful fundraiser.

“One of the most simple programs, but yet one of the most memorable and visible and impressive,” McCabe said. “Nov. 1. we put the flags we had gotten already out there — and it was maybe 100 or 200 but they just kept coming in. By the end of the month we had just shy of 1,000 flags on the lawn.”

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Culture Pitt students share fashion, college experiences and Jazz studies documentary pittnews.com

Diana Velasquez Senior Staff Writer

With so many apps to pick from and so much content to then peruse, there are seemingly limitless choices for how to spend our time on our phones. But TikTok, the video social networking app, is the app of choice for millennials and Gen Z alike.

People spend hours on it, and Pitt students are no exception. In fact, many students have taken advantage of it and made themselves TikTok creators, with videos varying from college oriented-topics to viral dances.

TikTok accounts come in all shapes and sizes, each with their own audience for a specific kind of content. TikTok behemoths like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae post primarily dance

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celebrity encounters on TikTok videos and have amassed an upwards of 50 million followers. They operate similarly to other social media influencers on Instagram and Twitter, only their medium of choice is chiefly 60-second videos. There are sides of TikTok dedicated to anime and fandom content just as there are sides dedicated to makeup tutorials. TheaterTok even managed to make a bootleg musical based off the Disney-Pixar movie Ratatouille over quarantine.

Megan Franco, a sophomore psychology and theatre arts major, said she interacts with and often makes content with these more niche TikTok communties like TheatreTok, Gay TikTok and Comedy TikTok. She said these microcommunties can serve as refuges for individuals who don’t feel so welcomed by their family at home.

“Some of the communities on TikTok are

very supportive and so I think people look for that comfort and support, even if it's from complete strangers,” she said. “It’s support that they might not be getting in their real life.”

Franco started making TikToks consistently at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, though she made a popular TikTok with 142,500 views in February 2020, which pokes fun at students’ expectations of Pitt compared to reality. She said once she got more attention on the app she had to get used to being in front of the camera.

“I’m not used to being on stage or in front of the camera so I had to work with that,” she said.

“It’s going to feel weird being on camera, but I don't need to worry about it too much because what I noticed is that people won’t [care].”

Most TikToks don't go viral, but creators

February 3, 2021

have built followings by catering their content to a specific brand or community. Hannah Lempert’s videos rake in viewers who are dedicated to the content.

Lempert, the public relations coordinator for the University of Thriftsburgh thrift store, said they started a TikTok account with the intent of getting people interested in and aware of thriting while sharing the benefits of shopping for second-hand clothing.

“I really want to emphasize to people all over that thrifting is not just some trend that we should be participating in,” Lempert, a sophomore urban studies major, said. “It's a conscious act to stop fast fashion and consumerism of

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Opinions Ajani Powell Staff Columnist

Black History Month is starting and I would like to bring attention to that fact, but more attention to the fact that Black is okay — the word, the color and the people. People do not need to feel uncomfortable referring to Black people as Black. It is often preferred to refer to Black people as Black because POC is not inclusive to Black issues and was created to undermine the Black experience.

To begin, let me announce that I am Black.

Blackitty Black. I have to hold my ears down when getting my hair combed — Black. I have no issues with being called dark or AfricanAmerican, but I prefer Black, and there is nothing wrong with that. Growing up, people made me feel like I had to be ashamed for being Black and having darker skin, but there is nothing to

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We need to improve Holocaust education pittnews.com

Black is not a bad word be ashamed of. I just produce a great amount of melanin, and I am grateful for that. Black has a bad rep, and I am here to clear its name.

Black has been used with weak symbolic representation that contributes to its association with badness. When we think of people being morally corrupt, we say that their soul is blackened. In shows or movies, they often depict the evil characters dressed in black or dark colors.

We could use Disney as a case study — Maleficent, Ursula, Cruella de Vil, even Scar are all dressed in black or have black features. We are socialized to think that black is bad, sorrowful even — this is why at funerals everyone dresses in black. Studies have shown that it's gotten to the point that people ascribe darker skin to a higher likeliness of committing violence. This phenomenon is called the “bad is black” effect.

Not only is it problematic, but it is harmful towards Black people because it characterizes a

feature they cannot control as a social opposition, aggression.

We need to begin to challenge this association between color and emotion, especially for black. I believe Alain Badiou does a great job of challenging our beliefs in his book “Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Color.” In the book, Badiou makes a point that contradicts our perceived notion of black being corrupt.

“Scientists confirm it: black is not a color …

There’s no light, there’s no color … Black is passive negation … [while white is] the combined, confused sum of all possible colors. Black is the absence of color, while white is the impure mixture of all the colors,” Badiou writes.

This perspective challenges everything we know. The way in which Badiou pursues color suggests that black is pure, while white is confused and impure. Now imagine being socialized to think this way. Whiteness would

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be associated with impurity and confusion.

Would you value any scholar who was white if you were conditioned to believe that they were confused? You may give them a chance after decades of corrections, but there will always be a subconscious bias that exists and would affect being hired at a job or getting into university.

Perhaps this perspective awakens you to the daily experience of Black people.

It is important to examine the origin of discomfort for Black people. With identity politics in mind, people try not to use any language that may get them “cancelled.” Thus, they avoid trigger words that are sensitive to backlash. Instead of saying Black, they will say African American.

Although African American may sound academically and politically correct and appraised, it can be incorrect. There are Black people who are not American. Also, the generalized use of “African” has to do with slave “culture” and the inability to trace the lineage of enslaved persons.

There are people who know where they are from and have strong roots in their culture. Not only is it simply inaccurate to refer to them as African American, but it excludes the Black Experience. Being Black doesn’t rely on the origin of Black you are, but the collective affairs that Black people endure.

Now with Black Lives Matter trending, the confusion between using Black and African American is excluding members from this necessary conversation. Since Black Lives Matter is based in the United States, some felt as if it was an American issue and started saying African American Lives Matter. However, this was leaving out the voices of people experiencing police brutality outside of America. To use African American is to be nation-specific and, in the case of BLM, it doesn’t recognize the problem outside of America. This is why we emphasize Black. Black is inclusive to all people of African descent.

Many people think of Black as a bad or dirty word. It is this discomfort that brought about the phrase “People of Color,” or POC. “People

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Sports Club sports navigate pandemic protocols,

Baseball preview pittnews.com

Dalton Miller Staff Writer

The phrase “spring break” often evokes images of vacations down south for a week of fun in the sun. For Pitt club baseball pitcher and digital media chair Matthew Drobner, that experience becomes a baseball player’s dream.

The Pitt club baseball team traditionally drives 18 hours down to Florida, playing games the whole week against teams from across the country. But with Pitt’s decision to eliminate spring break this year as part of pandemic-influenced calendar changes, Drobner, a senior media and professional communications major, won’t get to participate again.

“It’s one of the best parts of our club because it truly brings everyone closer together,” Drobner said. “It’s sad to think that I already had my last Florida trip.”

That spring trip represents just one of the many sacrifices Pitt club sports teams have made as they try to maneuver through a school year amid a pandemic. Each Panther squad currently faces its own confusing situation, and has chosen to handle it in different ways.

The Pitt women’s ice hockey team couldn’t compete in any games this season, but goalie and team general manager Katie Rerko said the team still has had the ability to practice at the Alpha Ice Complex, located 20 minutes northeast of Oakland, during the fall semester.

These sessions have looked much different thanks to social distancing requirements. Rerko, a junior psychology major, said every practice had to be performed without contact — a big shake-up from the physical nature of hockey — and all players had to wear masks for the entirety of practice. These practices focused primarily on individual skills, with no need to prepare for games.

Similarly, the club handball team has conducted practices focusing on shooting and passing drills, because scrimmaging would require lots of physical contact. Club handball president Pau Balcells Sanchez said although handball doesn’t feel the same with these limitations, he

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heavily modified seasons

has appreciated the unique sessions the team has put together.

“Taking into account the circumstances, I am really happy how the practices have turned out this year,” Balcells Sanchez, a sophomore applied math and philosophy major, said. “It has helped us to focus more on the technique aspect of the sport, which we didn’t have that much time to train last year.”

Because of an increase in costs for time on the ice, the women’s ice hockey team could only schedule one practice per week instead of two.

The team may not even have that luxury in the spring, as many rinks have closed down — a real disappointment to Rerko, considering these gettogethers have had more meaning than usual this season.

“We tried to have practices that were more competition-based to have fun and make up for the fact that we weren’t playing games,” Rerko said.

Some teams have struggled to maintain a roster throughout inactivity. Daniel Morton, who plays on the club basketball team, said the team hasn’t practiced this semester. Pitt has implemented restrictions for basketball reservations at Trees Hall — Morton said only one player can use each basket, for example. Morton, a senior electrical engineering major, said the team hasn’t added any new players because it couldn’t hold tryouts.

Teams that could meet together in the fall — like club field hockey, which conducted practices with masks and social distancing required — got to bring in new players. Field hockey club president Deanna Huck said the team hosted Zoom sessions to get new players acclimated with the rest of the team. Huck, a senior neuroscience and psychology major, said they mostly consisted of “introductions and chalk talk.”

Pitt men’s club lacrosse head coach Rich Rattner said his team practiced four days a week during the fall. Besides offseason workouts, including plans for both gym access and at-home situations, the Panthers have attempted to replicate competition on the field.

“We did run fall ball socially distancing, ba-

sically non-contact, which is kind of hard in the sport of lacrosse because the premise of the sport has a lot of contact involved,” Rattner said.

The women’s club lacrosse team faces a similar situation to the men’s team, having practiced in the fall with masks and social distancing required. The team practiced three times a week — twice in the sports dome without coaches and once a week at the Schenley Park soccer field with coaches, according to club president Callan Powers.

“We’re hoping to get in a few scrimmages against other teams throughout the semester but are unsure if that will happen,” Powers, a junior natural sciences major, said.

The team has its sights on the WCLA National Tournament, currently slated for the second week of May, but doesn’t know if the event

February 3, 2021

will end up happening or not.

Rattner said he believes the University should consider other approaches that would maintain player and coach safety but wouldn’t involve restrictions that impede gameplay. He said camps run by U.S. Lacrosse this summer used face shields and other protocols to play the game safely, adding that the camps had no coronavirus infections.

Rattner said his team currently plans to play a full season in the spring, but first must wait on permission from the University. Rattner and his staff have already scheduled a 14-game slate that includes road trips to Temple, Buffalo and Virginia Tech, which he said most teams have done

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