Get With The Program

It's time, Susan Riley writes, to stop treating anti-vaxxers with kid gloves:

It is long past time that governments, institutions, unions, corporations, school boards—especially health-care providers, but, basically, anyone who delivers a public service—stopped cowering in the face of anti-vaxxers, stopped trying to reason with ill-informed or bad-tempered zealots, stopped extending deadlines, and watering down regulations to suit the obstinate and the ignorant.

Enough with both-sidesism, with attempts at “balance.” Science and evidence, versus harebrained social media quackery, is not a debate worth indulging. Enough, too, with the elaborate delicacy with which vaccine-resisters have been treated, the gentle encouragement from premiers and their medical officers of health to get shots (in lieu of mandatory deadlines). Alberta even offered cash bribes to induce people to do the right thing.

So much, too, for spineless politicians—Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, who won’t even disclose the vaccination status of his MPs, springs to mind—who acknowledge they have received the shots themselves, who earnestly urge their co-citizens to do the same, but, in the next breath, are ready to give people the choice of an effective vaccine, or expensive, and uncertain, frequent testing. And what happens when anti-vaxxers set up a howl against “forced” testing?

COVID is going to be with us for a long time. Vaccinations -- annual vaccinations -- will be the new normal. And most Canadians accept that fact:

Polls repeatedly show a large majority of Canadians support vaccines. After a year-and-a-half, and millions of vaccines administered world-wide, there has been a statistically insignificant number of bad reactions. The vaccines are safe. They don’t offer 100 per cent protection against COVID, but they have been proven to radically reduce the severity of the disease and the need for hospitalization.

Instead of engaging in bogus arguments over the “violation” of the rights of vaccine-resisters—this high-handed trampling of our “freedom” to become desperately ill and to infect others—governments should be defending the parents, children, grandparents, and others, threatened by the stunning selfishness of the few.

The most  infuriating anti-vaxxers -- those who work in health care -- should be given no leeway:

The most unforgivable failure, however, is various provinces’ inability, unwillingness, timidity—all of the above—to insist that staff in long-term care homes and hospitals be fully vaccinated. After so many seniors died, especially in the gruesome first months of the pandemic, it is unconscionable that, vaxxed or not, they are still at risk of outside infection.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week announced that hospital staff who are not vaccinated must submit to regular COVID testing. But no testing regime, or infection control measures, can match a vaccine for preventing spread. Ford blamed this cowardly, complicit approach on fear of losing too many front-line employees in a sector already under pressure. Which raises a pertinent question: do we want anti-vaxxers working in a hospital setting, or with vulnerable seniors? If they don’t believe in modern medicine, why are they in the sector in the first place?

When your paycheque depends on whether or not you've been vaccinated, even the loud and the obnoxious will get with the program.

Image: The Financial Times