Are vaccination priorities a secret?

The media report retirement homes, then front-line and essential workers as top-ofthe-list for needle service.

But after these logical groups, reliable information seems to lurk only in a black hole somewhere deep in Tunney's Pasture.

You may be over 80, as I am, and bear a dozen ghastly underlying ills; nobody in “public health” can reveal anything — except that deaths come too quickly and vaccine deliveries come too slowly. Public health websites and voices on the telephones only tell you how sorry they are that they know nothing

Thousands of dedicated Canadians struggle in our complex federal system to get needles into arms. But it's the top people who control information, and must face an often-frustrated public.

Citizens in all COVID-afflicted countries are upset at obtuse governments. But some governments are trying homemade information solutions. France, for example, mobilizes its country doctors both to inform and to immunize isolated patients. Better still, it makes available to all citizens a single national website with up-to-date information on priority groups. It also lists a single national phone number that transfers callers to local operators able to make vaccination appointments. Citizens can also make their own appointments from their home computers.

Ottawans are blessed with ministers, generals and bureaucrats dealing in prioritizing. Why didn't they ask computer-famous Waterloo University to devise something like a French-style, citizen-friendly info system?

Be patient, assure our top authorities. It's awfully hard for us to do our job of knowing and telling you nothing. No news is not good news. It's just a bluffing, unacceptable kind of public service.

Keith Spicer, Ottawa