A Grand Slam Life: A Physician Gets Covid, Finds His Way, and Works to Transform a Texas Community

By Milton Haber M.D. and Beth Herman

A workaholic physician for more than 30 years, often at the expense of family, Milton Haber defied convention in his internal medicine practice in marginalized Laredo, Texas. House calls, groceries, cash, prescriptions, birthday cakes, Thanksgiving turkeys, and paying utility bills for patients were common occurrences, as was his quest to do more.
In 2018 he founded Laguna Clinical Research Associates, helping thousands of South Texans by partnering with drug companies to execute clinical trials. Laguna partnered with Moderna in 2020 to execute the COVID-19 vaccine trials, a challenging feat in a minority community that mistrusts science. Catching the virus himself, the doctor spent a week in intensive care, in and out of consciousness and under pandemic rules totally alone. He thought deeply about family, friends, and death. The experience broke him wide open to the intrinsic power of love. It underscored the importance of the vaccine. It revealed on practical and spiritual levels the disposition needed for all of us to live together in a drastically altered post-COVID world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665528771

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© 2021 Milton Haber, M.D. with Beth Herman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  07/16/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2878-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2876-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2877-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021911846

Photo cover by Jose Joe Sillas.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1   In the Beginning

Chapter 2   In the Clearing

Chapter 3   In the Thick of It

Chapter 4   In the Process

Chapter 5   In the ACTS

Chapter 6   In the Zone

Chapter 7   In the Lab

Chapter 8   In the Light

Chapter 9   In a Post-COVID World

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the future of clinical trials

and its role in making the world a better place.

Prologue

I’ve often wondered why people write a book. Is it a passion they have? A burning desire to right some wrong? Valuable lessons that should be shared? Is there an inspiring story that needs to be told? Perhaps it’s a simple, earnest attempt to plant the seeds of change. For me, it was all of the above. The catalyst, however, was getting the coronavirus myself. As a practicing internist in Laredo, Texas, and Founding Owner and President of Laguna Clinical Research Associates, LLC—a medical research company helping execute the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine trials, experiencing the virus gave me insights I’d never have had on the outside looking in. But that’s only part of the story.

Newly approved for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), when the approved vaccine arrived in Laredo, I’d just come through a debilitating few weeks of fevers, fatigue, and a crushing weakness that caused me to fall and strike my chest and abdomen on an iron bedpost. I cut myself up and broke my third, fourth, and seventh ribs. I was hospitalized. Turns out I had pneumonia and there were other issues I will talk about later in the book.

I returned to work just as twenty-five hundred cars queued up for five hundred doses of the vaccine. I was equal parts elated and heartbroken. Help for my community was finally here and people had really gotten the message my research company had tried so hard to convey amid controversy about the readiness of the vaccine: that people needed to trust science. We were doing something productive and people turned out, yet with this shortage we were falling shy of our goal.

Barely recovered and not at my strongest, nevertheless all day I moved from car to car, thanking people and reassuring the ones turned away that one way or another, if they stayed committed and stayed the course, life would surely change for them. I cared and would never give up.

Laredo is an underserved community. The clinical trials my research company got to administer were in themselves a gift because historically, less than 1 percent of Latino and Black populations participate in clinical trials. When Moderna selected Laguna from a large number of interested venues, I was quite proactive, going on TV and social media to promote the importance of the study to the community and how fortunate Laredo was to have been selected to participate. Despite the politics of it all, you’ll see me say a number of times throughout the book that we need to trust science. It helped when Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, put pressure on Moderna to increase its enrollment, which opened the door to expanded recruitment efforts trickling down to us in Laredo. It was an unprecedented opportunity here to change people’s lives, and for me to serve my community in the process.

But how and why did I get involved in clinical trials to begin with, and why does my story matter?

Since 1987, my internal medicine practice has grown from a first day grand total of thirteen patients to twelve thousand. I was proud of the hard work that went into building this practice because again, so much of my community is marginalized. I was born and raised in a hard-working Laredo family, and in addition to my Hippocratic Oath, if my patients were hungry there was no way I wasn’t going to feed them. If they lacked funds to pay the landlord, I was going to help them see to that too. You’ve heard of doctors who practice holistic medicine, treating not just the symptoms of the disease but the whole patient. Well, you might say—and all too often to my accountant’s dismay—that I practice holistic everything. I’m just one person, not a foundation or institution, but I’ve always tried to go beyond treating illness into treating humanity. It’s one thing to get medication but if you can’t keep the lights on to see well enough to see the label, what’s the point? I also hoped to be an example for my children and others who may be paying attention, to help them understand that as human beings we are not separate. Pain, lack, and suffering are universal conditions. Each of us doing what we can to alleviate it—whatever form that takes—should also be a universal condition. So I’ve spent three decades trying. Yet, over time, somehow I felt what I was doing on my own wasn’t enough. There were times I felt as though I was just wallowing around in the water.

In 2019, in tandem with Veronica Procasky, a gifted and visionary attorney and nurse who would later become my company’s CEO (more about our propitious meeting later in the book), we started Laguna Clinical Research Associates, LLC. As a medical research company, Laguna qualifies to conduct clinical trials that will ultimately benefit hundreds of thousands of people—clearly more than the number of patients I got to help from time to time.

I have always believed the direction of our lives is decided long before we live them in a kind of life script. Our lives are predestined. If we deviate from the script, life gets off track and we’re flailing, and if we’re honest with ourselves we know it. We generally follow the script, though, and for me, years later, I felt a calling to be part of something bigger, which turned out to be research and clinical trials.

As the Fates would have it, soon after Laguna Research was established, COVID-19 hit. When we were sanctioned to help execute the Moderna vaccine trials, I had an emotional reaction. I knew the results of our research would be immediate. People beyond the trial participants would get help—our country needed help—and not years down the road as happens with most clinical trials. The average timetable in terms of vaccine development is five to ten years. The coronavirus vaccine was developed and implemented in about seven months.

Though we are on the right path, I have deep concerns about the fallout from the coronavirus. At this time, inevitably, the number and variations of comorbidities—the ways in which COVID-19 may affect our hearts, gastrointestinal, nervous, and reproductive systems, brain function, etc.—are both incalculable and incomprehensible. The medical landscape, political or otherwise, will undergo radical change. Its economic impact is something of which we can’t yet fully conceive. Every human being on this earth will be impacted by the coronavirus for years to come. Our ability to anticipate, project, pivot, and effectively meet the challenges, as well as our willingness to extend ourselves in whatever ways we can to help others, will be the key to our survival. This will also be the key to our happiness so that each of us can fulfill our purpose on earth.

My profession is rooted in science, traditionally the bastion of dispassionate realists and the like. While I’m a realist myself, I also tend to be more of an optimist, and just maybe a little overboard in my quest to save the world. I want to make sure people know there are thousands of researchers and physicians in this country and elsewhere who do give a damn. They care about outcomes and quality of life. They want to make a difference as much as I do, and though the coronavirus is a bend in the road almost no one could anticipate, we are here to see our patients through it at all costs.

Overall I had a good life growing up but it wasn’t without its own set of challenges, the story of which I’ll unpack as we move through the book. One thing I learned was the importance of taking care of others.

My mother was born overseas and raised in Mexico before coming to the United States. As a small boy with her en route to visit my grandparents, stopped in a San Luis Potosi train station, I saw a nursing mother propped up in the middle of the floor. She was young but wrinkled beyond belief. She looked beaten down by life, something I’d not seen in my small Texas town, though I’d see more of