Ontario Liberals push unrealistic vaccine mandate

Forced COVID shots for kids a nwn-starter

There are several important questions that too often go unasked during election campaigns when parties hatch “big ideas.” Knowing how the party in question operates in government or in general, does this big idea actually seem doable — physically, mechanically, politically? Does the party in question have the gumption to see such a big idea through? And even more basic: Does this seem like something the party would even want to accomplish, were it elected?

Dubious big ideas are already piling up in Ontario, not even a week into its mercifully brief provincial election campaign. And they are not getting all the scrutiny they deserve.

The most recent isn't so much big as aggressive: The Liberals say they would add COVID-19 to the list of afflictions against which schoolchildren must be vaccinated — “because the science is settled on this,” leader Steven Del Duca averred, and the Liberals always follow the evidence. (Just ask them!)

We'll come back to the science. For now let's run the questions.

Is it doable mechanically? Adding “COVID-19” to a list of mandatory vaccinations certainly is, though it's reasonable to assume exemption rates would be high and enforcement lax.

Fourteen schools in Toronto report rates of below 70 per cent for vaccination against diphtheria, tetanus and polio, despite those already being mandatory. “Current exemptions under the Immunization of School Pupils Act will continue to apply,” the Liberal news release notes — reason enough to take this idea with a giant brick of salt.

Is it doable politically? Probably not. Of note, it is not being done in any other Canadian province. And there is no doubt what would follow such a move: Massive protests, including by people the Liberals could not afford to alienate.

Militant pro-vaxxers like to imagine their opponents as comprising the worst elements of the trucker convoy, the People's Party and U.S. Republicans. It's easier that way. But only 36 per cent of Ontarians aged five to 11 are fully vaccinated — Del Duca's proposal theoretically puts back-to-school in the fall at risk for almost 700,000 children — and the lowest rates of vaccination, children and adults alike, are hugely correlated to vulnerable demographics.

The areas with the lowest vaccination rates in Toronto and other cities are all relatively poor, immigrant-heavy and non-white.

If premier Del Duca told those people they couldn't send their kids to school, not only would there be mass protests by parents, the Toronto Star would run seven articles a day smacking him and his health and education ministers around until they changed their minds. And rightly so.

Is it something the Liberals would even want to do? Based on the foregoing, I would say not. Even in opposition they supported the PC government's dropping of mask and vaccine mandates on March 1, except in “higher-risk and essential” settings. They just have this weird idea that schools are “higher-risk” settings. “(The Progressive Conservatives') hyper-political approach undermined confidence in vaccines and prolonged lockdowns and suffering — particularly for our kids,” Del Duca claimed in the mandatory-vaccination news release.

It's maddening that this rhetoric can still play after we have understood COVID-19'S saving grace for so long: Whatever its immediate and long-term effects, they are enormously concentrated among the elderly and extremely rare among the young. If it was necessary to make otherwise healthy children's lives as miserable as they have been for the past two years, it was not to protect those children; it was to protect their parents and, to a vastly greater extent, their grandparents and great-grandparents.

The vast majority of children will only be transmitters, not hospital patients. So it would be bizarre to impose mandatory vaccination on schoolchildren while leaving much more vulnerable adults to their own devices.

Yet somehow that's where the Liberals landed: Mandatory vaccination for kids at school, but not for adults at the office, for example. At some level, they have to realize it makes no sense.

As for the science being settled ... well, it just isn't. Notably, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) only recommends that the Pfizer vaccine be offered to children aged five to 11; it's not freaked out by the idea of many parents declining.

“It is essential that children aged five to 11 years and their parents are supported and respected in their decisions regarding COVID-19 vaccinations for their children, whatever decisions they make, and are not stigmatized for accepting, or not accepting, the vaccination offer,” NACI cautions.

Forcing the issue would no doubt knock a few parents off the fence. But I have been surprised and saddened to hear just how badly some parents were willing to screw up their kids' lives in order to keep them pure of blood: no field trips, no sports, no hanging out with friends at Mcdonald's, no sleepovers in some provax households.

They're not just pretending to make a point. They're in it to win it, and their kids pay the price. A government-in-waiting should be looking for ways to lower that price, not hyperinflate it. The implausibility of this big idea is its only saving grace.