LIBERALS ARE UNDERMINING OUR VACCINATION CAMPAIGN.
Over 70 per cent of eligible Canadians have been double-vaccinated to protect against COVID-19. This is an incredible achievement that undeniably puts us in a strong position relative to our peer countries in the fight against the pandemic. On the other hand, almost 30 per cent of our population isn’t fully vaccinated. That’s a lot of Canadians. And as the daily rate of vaccination slows to a crawl, we’re starting to turn on our own.
While the temptation to rage against the unvaccinated is strong, disdain, contempt and superiority will only serve to further alienate those who already feel alienated, risking what little collective sense of mission we have and turning public health into a political battlefield.
The urge to lash out against the unvaccinated is strong and perhaps understandable. As experts collect more and more data, it’s clear that infections leading to hospitalization or death are dramatically reduced when vaccination rates go up.
Even if you are willing to personally take your chances with the virus, there are other reasons to want to help increase the number of vaccinated Canadians by getting the jab yourself.
Most governments across the country have tied reopening plans to vaccination rates, meaning the more people who get vaccinated, the more things we can do and the faster we can get back to normal. And yet, the vaccination rate has slowed significantly, and the number of unvaccinated Canadians remains stubbornly high.
Vaccine hesitancy was a public policy problem long before COVID-19. Particularly in the last decade, diseases like measles, once beaten back by vaccines developed in the 1960s, have seen resurgences in communities where vaccination rates have dropped. Celebrities like Jenny Mccarthy falsely linked vaccines to autism, as the anti-vaxxer movement proliferated online.
It was easy to dismiss the anti-vaxxers when the issue was niche.
But now that COVID-19 has brought vaccine hesitancy into the mainstream, the inability of so many vaccinated people to understand where anti-vaxxers are coming from has curdled into white hot rage.
With anger comes lashing out. While there has been some earnest investigation into why so many remain unvaccinated, the majority of elite public opinion has dripped with disdain.
Popular feminist author and public intellectual Jessica Valenti wrote a column for the New York Times capturing the general feeling among urban, highly educated professionals. Raging at the unvaccinated, her quotes were shared heavily on social media by those who felt she gave voice to their anger.
“Either you’re someone who cares about your neighbours and community or you’re not,” she wrote. “Either you’re willing to sacrifice for the good of others or you’re not.”
Valenti has no desire to understand the unvaccinated. Her only motivation is to express her anger and confusion, and let the unvaccinated know she thinks they’re scum.
The tribalism Valenti deploys to split her country into camps has run rampant in the United States these past couple years. Mask mandates and lockdowns have been political footballs and sources of cultural tension since the first weeks of the pandemic. Canada had managed to largely avoid those kinds of conflicts until recently, but impending elections are proving too tempting to those who seek to drive wedges through the electorate.
First, the federal Liberals announced they would be verifying the vaccination status of election candidates, then they announced a plan to require employees in the public service and in some federally regulated industries to be vaccinated (after months of inaction), in what was clearly designed as a political trap for Conservative Leader Erin O’toole.
At the same time, the Ontario Liberals are attempting to tie anti-vaxxers to Premier Doug Ford, even though his Progressive Conservative government has laid out plans to mandate vaccinations for health-care and education workers.
Meanwhile, federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine Mckenna made her disdain for the vaccine hesitant clear, tweeting: “climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and misogynists all hang out together. Quite the club.”
But the 42-year-old Ontario woman who votes Liberal, the archetype of the average vaccine-hesitant person according to pollster Bruce Anderson, might be surprised to know she is perceived that way.
Anderson’s research brings nuance to the conversation about the unvaccinated. In fact, only about seven per cent of Canadians outright refuse to get vaccinated. Of the 30 per cent who aren’t fully vaccinated, around 10 per cent have received one dose and could likely be easily persuaded to get the second.
Thoughtful investigation of the motivations of the remainder of unvaccinated Canadians reveals that there is no single explanation for vaccine hesitancy. There are a constellation of reasons, including inaccessibility, precarious work, geographic isolation and lack of trust in a health-care system that has often let underprivileged Canadians down.
Fortunately, front-line health workers are rolling up their sleeves to not only find empathy for the unvaccinated, but to meet them where they are, help them overcome obstacles and chip away at vaccination rates for the collective good. They are recruiting workers who speak languages other than English, going into communities and reaching people through trusted community leaders and primary care physicians.
The Ontario government is also onboard with this empathetic approach, deploying mobile vaccine clinics to reach the often unreachable. Ontario has also made the decision to improve the frequency and accuracy of COVID-19 data, so numbers can show people the impact vaccination rates have on decreasing hospitalizations and deaths.
The actions of Liberal political leaders, and the angry public intellectuals who encourage them, are hindering the cause of reducing vaccine hesitancy and increasing our collective immunity. They are the actions of ideological warriors who are capitalizing on public fear to further sow division, wedge voters and trip up their opponents. This may serve them well in upcoming elections, but it will do so at the expense of institutional trust and social cohesion, making public health another permanent front in the culture war.