Yust's ex-girlfriends take center stage in 3rd day of trial

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    Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly was the first woman to write scripts for the Wonder Woman comic-book franchise, but hardly anyone was aware of that for almost 70 years. Then Jill Lepore tracked her down while writing her 2014 book, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” and suddenly Hummel was a cause célèbre in the fan universe. The late-life acclaim mystified her a bit. “She was amazed that people made such a big deal over it,” her son Robb Murchison said in a phone interview. “She’d say, ‘It’s just a comic book.’ She kind of played it down.” Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times She was 19 and known as Joye Hummel in March 1944, when she went to work for William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who had created Wonder Woman three years earlier and found himself with a product that was in such demand that he couldn’t keep up. “At first, Hummel typed Marston’s scripts,” Lepore, who teaches at Harvard University, wrote in “The Secret History.” “Soon, she was writing scripts of her own.” Hummel said she wrote the scripts for more than 70 Wonder Woman adventures (though her name appeared on none of them), helping to form what became the most enduring and widely recognized female figure in the superhero universe. Then, in 1947, shortly after Marston died of polio, she stopped. She had just married David Murchison, a widower with a young daughter; being at home for that child, Hummel thought, was more important than her work on Wonder Woman. Hummel became largely invisible as far as the comic-book world was concerned. Robb Murchison said that her family and a few others knew of her role, but that she didn’t advertise it. Lepore, though, researching her book, came across Hummel’s name and went looking for her. “I found her by the usual detective work,” she said by email. “Ancestry.com, online directories. I wrote her a letter, and then I called her up. She told me she’d never agreed to speak with anyone about Wonder Woman.” Lepore’s book brought Hummel overdue recognition. Mark Evanier, a noted comic-book writer and historian, helped arrange to bring her to Comic-Con in San Diego in 2018 to accept the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. (Finger, too, was late in being recognized for his accomplishments; he helped create Batman but went uncredited for years.) It was Hummel’s first appearance at a comics convention. “In all my years of Comic-Conning,” Evanier said by email, “I can’t recall another moment when the audience was so eager to give someone a long, loving ovation and the recipient was so delightfully surprised to be at an event like that, receiving one.” Hummel — Kelly since her 2000 marriage to Jack Kelly — died on April 5, the day after her 97th birthday, at her home in Winter Haven, Florida. Her son confirmed the death. Hummel said that back when she was writing Wonder Woman scripts, “we could not show a corpse, we could not show somebody putting a knife in somebody, somebody shooting somebody, nothing against any race, anything like that.” “There were 10 of these restrictions,” she said in a panel discussion at the 2018 Comic-Con. “I didn’t get in much trouble,” she added, but Marston sometimes did. Lepore interviewed Hummel by phone in 2014 and then visited her in Florida. “She told me about her rules for writing Wonder Woman,” she said. “The plot: ‘There was a bad man and this good woman is going to stop him. You don’t admire the bad man. You admire her.’” Hummel thought that some later Wonder Woman writers had lost sight of that guiding principle, Lepore said. “She said she thought the character and the comics had gotten worse after Marston died, because of viciousness,” she added. “Everyone got vicious. That drove her nuts. Her most important rule for writing Wonder Woman: ‘You can have excitement without glorifying evil and violence.’ She wanted people to know that, as a rule for everything.” Joye Evelyn Hummel was born on April 4, 1924, on Long Island. Her father, Quenten, managed a grocery chain, assisted by her mother, Mavis Hummel. Hummel attended Middlebury College in Vermont for a year, then switched to the Katharine Gibbs School, a secretarial school in New York, where Marston taught psychology. (“It’s closed of course now,” she told Lepore, “because nobody has to be accurate now.”) Her performance on an exam in his class made such an impression that he offered her a job on his Wonder Woman staff. “She liked his intellect, and they just clicked,” her son said. “It was like this mind meld.” In her book, Lepore wrote that Marston had thought that Hummel could help in particular with the slang of the day. But she also understood his vision. “He was not writing just an adventure book,” Hummel told The San Diego Union Tribune in 2018. “He wanted those who read ‘Wonder Woman’ to be inspired — that the young women who read the stories would be inspired to study and enter the world and have confidence they could accomplish things. I think he felt that a woman’s touch would make the world better.” Hummel was paid $50 per script. In August 1944, just months after she had started working for him, Marston was found to have polio. Thereafter, she shuttled from the office he had established in New York City to his home in Rye, New York, where he was increasingly confined. They would look over the scripts each was working on, give each other suggestions, and try to make sure that there was nothing that would run afoul of the 10-person panel that reviewed each script. (Among the panel’s members, Hummel said, was writer Pearl S. Buck.) Churches, too, were beginning to take notice of this alluring female character and express concern about her. “There was always a battle of the shorts,” Hummel said in the Comic-Con panel discussion. “One of the churches: ‘The shorts are too short. We want the shorts longer.’ And Marston said, ‘I don’t want them to look like men’s underwear.’” The early comics were drawn by Harry G. Peter. Hummel’s son, Robb Murchison, said she was again a pioneer in the 1960s, when she passed a stockbroker’s exam at a time when there were few women in that field. Her first husband died in 2000. In addition to Kelly and her son, she is survived by a stepdaughter from her first marriage, Sally Boyd; two stepchildren from her second marriage, Kimberly Hallberg and Jeffrey Kelly; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. A second son from her first marriage, David Jr., died in 2015. Evanier said that when he first called Hummel about coming to Comic-Con, “I think she thought at first it was some phone scam deal and I’d be asking her for her credit card number.” The welcome she received at the event, he said, was inspiring. “It was thrilling to see what she meant to the women in the audience or waiting in line to meet her,” he said. “She was truly a heroine — as great in her own way as Wonder Woman — to those who understood what a career woman was up against in that era.” Near the end of the panel discussion, cartoonist Trina Robbins, who along with Evanier was interviewing Hummel, asked everyone in the packed audience who was dressed in some version of a Wonder Woman costume to stand so that Hummel could see how influential she had been. A wave of applause followed, and Evanier asked the guest of honor how the reception made her feel. “You don’t want to see the writer of Wonder Woman cry, do you?” she said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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    When federal officials paused administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six cases of a rare clotting disorder, one fatal, among the 6.9 million people who had received the vaccine, many critics noted that the chance of a serious ailment was so rare as to be negligible — less frequent than being struck by lightning. But that roughly one-in-a-million rate is far from certain. Doctors may ultimately find the vaccine is not responsible for the ailment. However, if the two are linked, it’s also possible that the chance of an adverse effect will be higher, even if it remains low. “Numbers seem quite solid, like, ‘Oh, it’s 10,’” said Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, who studies infectious disease. She said epidemiologists deal with similar matters of uncertainty at the beginning of disease outbreaks. “But they’re estimates, and they will need to be refined, and they may need to be refined a lot, especially since they are small numbers.” Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times — How do we know how common this event is? If there is a connection between the vaccine and this rare syndrome, new cases are likely to emerge now that the word is out. Regulators announced the pause in part to alert doctors to the existence of this syndrome; as people begin looking, they may be more likely to find and report it. With numbers so low, the addition of even a few more cases could increase the rate. (In the last few days, Johnson & Johnson has reported two more possible cases, one in a woman, and one in a man.) If there’s a link between the vaccine and the syndrome, more people who already got shots might still develop the clotting problem, since it appears to show up within a few weeks of vaccination. About half of Americans who received the Johnson & Johnson shot got it this month, according to government estimates. One reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine safety committee wants to wait longer before updating any guidance on the shot is to see what happens with this group. Since the pause was first recommended, the government count of Americans who have received the shot has increased to 7.7 million. It may turn out that only some segments of the population are at high risk of this problem, in the same way that some populations are at higher risk of serious issues from certain diseases. Most of the cases so far have been in women between 18 and 50. If we look at six cases in that population, the syndrome looks somewhat more common, though still very rare. If more cases are reported, it’s also possible that this gendered pattern will disappear. Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a vaccine safety expert at the CDC who presented numbers to the vaccine safety board this week, said all of the current calculations are still “crude.” — How can we tell that the clots wouldn’t have happened anyway? It’s hard to tell right now. Studies of such events typically compare people who are given a medication or vaccine with a control group of people who didn’t. With a rare disorder like this, that comparison couldn’t be easily made using clinical trials. Researchers are conducting a large study of the health records of 12 million patients called the Vaccine Safety Datalink, comparing medical records of people who are vaccinated earlier with those who get their shots later — a system that doesn’t rely on voluntary reporting. Those results will take a while. Researchers also look at what’s called a background rate of serious events: the odds someone could have a health problem even if he or she never got a vaccine. Comparing the rate of events among people who get a vaccine with the rate in the overall population can give a sense of whether a given patient’s outcome may be because of the vaccine, or is more likely to just be a coincidence. Women under 50 — the group that may be at risk of the particular type of blood clot that authorities have seen in the vaccinated patients — are more likely than the general population to have these blood clots just by being alive. — What is a rate we should care about? Many medications given to sick people can have serious side effects for some fraction of those who take them. Doctors and patients routinely weigh such risks against the benefits of medical treatment. Birth control pills with estrogen have been frequently discussed this week because they are a common medication carrying a risk of blood clots. Clots caused by birth control pills are different from the syndrome associated with the COVID vaccines, and some experts caution about comparing them directly. The kind of clots caused by oral contraceptives typically form in patients’ legs, not in their brains, but they can still be serious. The pills more than double a typical woman’s risk of such an event, meaning between 3 and 9 women out of 10,000 taking the pills for a year will develop a clot. (Pregnancy, the condition birth control pills are often prescribed to prevent, causes an even higher risk of blood clots.) “I’ll often say the risk of getting a blood clot with birth control pills is kind of similar to having a really serious reaction to penicillin,” said Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley, an obstetrician-gynecologist and CEO of Power to Decide, a group devoted to reducing unintended pregnancy. She frequently discusses blood clot risk with her patients, telling them the increase in risk and the overall magnitude of that risk. Most patients, she said, select their form of birth control based on other considerations. For vaccines, however, the threshold for safety is generally higher than for other kinds of medications. As many researchers have noted, COVID-19 puts people at risk of serious blood clots, too — much more so than any plausible estimate of the vaccine effect. But not everyone who fails to get vaccinated is going to get sick. “The disease you get by chance, and the vaccine you get by choice, and that’s what makes it harder,” said Dr. Steven Black, an emeritus professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, who studies vaccine safety. For other vaccines, the risk of serious adverse events is much lower than for birth control pills or penicillin — they generally occur in fewer than 1 in 100,000 who receive a given vaccine. That rate is “clearly much, much less than would be tolerated for a drug,” said Dr. Nicola Klein, director of the Kaiser Permanente vaccine study center, who is involved in the Vaccine Safety Datalink study. Most other vaccines protect against diseases that tend to be rare. By contrast, COVID-19 remains widespread throughout the United States and many parts of the world. Given the seriousness of the illness and its ease of spread, the value of vaccination may be higher now than it is when such trade-offs are usually considered. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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