Robin Sears writes that the pandemic has exposed just how fragile our public healthcare system is:
The list of the collective failures would fill an entire page of this newspaper. The top four might be terrible communications, inconsistency and contradiction, duelling governments, and a lack of transparency. This could be widening the serious trust gap, as revealed by the annual Edelman Trust Barometer.
Our leaders have pledged that they are going to fix things:
Everyone pledged the lessons learned from our very shaky anti-COVID campaign — the revelation of how underfunded, understaffed and inefficient our health-case systems are — meant this time, we really were going to make the big changes needed.
B.C. Premier John Horgan, chair of the provinces-and-territories club the Council of the Federation, had marshalled by last fall a series of promising breakthroughs on health-care reform with most club members. Ottawa has slow-walked the discussions since. As one frustrated senior provincial official exclaimed, “Why would a Liberal prime minister not want to have as part of his legacy the first breakthrough in health care in a generation, for Pete’s sake?” Indeed.
And now we're facing another virus:
Even its name inspires dread: “monkeypox.” We know how close genetically we are to monkeys — a lot closer than bats! Any virus with “pox” in its name brings back memories of all the terrifying poxes that have plagued humanity. We had declared smallpox — monkeypox’s close cousin — exterminated. Now we wonder.
The new virus is partly associated, so far, with men who have sex with other men, reviving memories of another nightmare — HIV/AIDS. Not only in its killing potential, but the possible rise in stigma and shame once more. Some on the right are sure soon to revive the old hatreds for partisan gain, just as Reagan-era Republicans and others did a generation ago.
We share both a horror at this new enemy, but also a deep weariness about virus-fighting overall. Every time we approach the finish line, the goalposts get moved. How prepared are we now, after all our bitterly earned experience? Apparently, not very. The same opaque and changing communications from public health officials; the same tug of war about access to vaccines. Skeptical citizens wonder if “those guys really know what the hell they are doing,” as one friend said.
Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam and her deputy Dr. Howard Ngoo may be great epidemiologists, but great communicators they will never be. They either need a persuasive Anthony Fauci-like spokesperson, or perhaps it’s time for them to hand on the baton. Public health has no exclusive minister in any Canadian government. Why? Health Canada and its provincial cousins have ignored, dismissed and treated it as a secondary health-care issue for decades.
There are national forums on many subsets of health-care issues, but not on public health. Why not? At the most basic level, most governments are ignorant of science itself. Ottawa briefly had an effective science minister a few years ago, Kirsty Duncan. The bureaucracy did in her and her ministry; few even noticed.
In public health systems and health care overall, real-time data sharing is still a pipe dream. How in God’s name can one urgently roll out best practices and important discoveries, if access to the data is buried in an annual report months later? A cliche loved by cynical Japanese people is: “We never learn from experience, we only learn from catastrophe.”
The catastrophe is upon us.
Image: Just Watch
