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

When Superstition Overthrows Reason

Vaccine mandates are -- finally --  on the menu. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

With an election getting underway, Justin Trudeau mandated vaccinations for air and rail travel, also requiring those in federal government jobs to get jabs — not least Liberal candidates looking for work on Parliament Hill.

At Queen’s Park, Doug Ford finally saw his way to cracking down on health-care workers who were falling through the cracks, while ordering all 64,000 civil servants to get vaccinated — including his own Progressive Conservative MPPs and future candidates.

At city hall, John Tory is now practising what he’s been preaching — finally demanding that municipal employees do what he’s been asking his federal and provincial counterparts to do. Now the big banks and insurance companies, after much hemming and hawing, have hedged their risks by demanding vaccinations for their sprawling bureaucracies.

Getting vaccinated used to be a no brainer:

Vaccinations have been saving lives for hundreds of years, they have been settled law for a century, and they have been a prerequisite for generations of schoolchildren (but for special exemptions). The only logical argument for delaying the mandating of vaccines was the lag in delivering them.

What has changed? We live in a time when superstition has overthrown reason. And politicians -- afraid of their constituents -- have thrown in their lot with superstition. Thankfully, some who used to work in government have insisted on the primacy of Reason:

David Agnew is now president of Seneca College, but he once served as cabinet secretary at Queen’s Park. Steve Orsini now heads the Council of Ontario Universities, but he too held the job of Ontario’s top public servant.

It is instructive that both have been so instrumental in demanding action: Orsini by exhorting Ford on behalf of Ontario’s universities this month, Agnew by closing off his campus to the unvaccinated.

Seneca was the first post-secondary institution to require vaccination for students and faculty on campus this summer. What made Agnew roll up his sleeves and take aim at those who won’t?

He reminded me that after running the machinery of a provincial government, he took over UNICEF Canada — a global role that brought him face to face with the life-saving power of vaccines, especially the fight against polio and the pushback from anti-vaxxers around the world. What he learned overseas hit home in Ontario:

“I object to people putting pseudo-science in the way of real science, or treating this as a sterile debate about rights versus the people around the world who are dying or disfigured,” Agnew told me.

That two former bureaucrats had to prod the politicians into action shows just how lumbering our leaders have become in mid-pandemic. That the private sector is lagging behind the public service in securing our workplaces is a sad sign of timidity in an emergency.

It is vital that we insist on the primacy of Reason. If we don't, we'll be lost.

Image: Quote Fancy