Mark Bulgutch is mystified about Ontario's vaccination program. He writes:
I readily admit some things are beyond my understanding. I don’t understand black holes in space for example. I don’t understand the rules of cricket or how a match can go on for days. I don’t understand why toast always falls to the floor with the buttered side down.
But what I really can’t understand right now is how Ontario botched its vaccination program so completely. It is as if the powers that be had no idea they would need to prepare for the day when vaccines arrived. I accept that the pandemic caught everyone off-guard, and there was a scramble to deal with getting ventilators for hospitals, PPE for front-line health care workers, and establishing rules for shutting down the economy.
By last summer, however, could not somebody have been told to begin to organize a vaccination plan? We didn’t need it the next day or the next, but we’d need it one day. Our political parties are forever planning the next election, even if it’s four years down the road. Our military plans for wars that we hope will never happen. Yet there is no evidence that anything was done to prepare for the certainty that vaccines were going to show up one day. It was a notion that caught Ontario by surprise.
Quebec has had all kinds of problems with COVID -- particularly deaths in nursing homes. But, at least, the province has a vaccination plan:
The good news is that something similar now seems to be happening here. Yesterday, my wife's friend took her elderly mother to a local community college gym. At the beginning of the morning, there was some delay in getting the process going. But, once things got started, vaccinations were given smoothly and quickly.
Finally, we're getting our act together.
Image: The Montreal Gazette
