Now comes the hard part

Only mass doses of vaccine get us back to normal

The Liberals seem set to clear a bar that the Conservatives, oddly, went out of their way to set very, very low.

On Monday, the prime minister announced that Canada would receive 249,000 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in coming weeks — this month, before the end of the year. Since the Pfizer vaccine requires a double dose, that’s enough to vaccinate 125,000 Canadians. It must be kept at ultracool temperatures, requiring special logistics to store and transport, so the provinces had better move quickly to prepare. But assuming we can figure out the transportation, storage and distribution, Canadians will be getting their jabs by Christmas. This is, to put it mildly, the best stocking-stuffer Justin Trudeau could have asked for.

The arrival of this small quantity of vaccine won’t end the pandemic. It’s just not enough. But if we use it wisely and if it proves effective, it will save lives. The pandemic will grind on for many months, but people will survive who’d otherwise have been lost. It will also help us, God willing, preserve critical capacity in vital societal institutions — inoculating medical workers will protect our fragile health-care system, and putting needles into the willing arms of long-term-care home workers will help reduce the deadly outbreaks in congregate-care settings that have caused us so much grief. This is the big picture — saved lives and stable institutions — and we shouldn’t lose sight of it.

But let’s not pretend that this latest development isn’t especially good news for the Liberals. The moment those doses touch down on Canadian soil, the Conservative “back of the line” talking point goes poof. This would mean, in fact, that Canada was damn near the front of the line. Weeks of work by the Conservatives to suggest that the Liberals have botched the vaccine effort wouldn’t be entirely wasted, but there’d be an awfully large hole punched into the narrative damn near the waterline.

Yes, yes, it’s true: 249,000 doses by Christmas doesn’t mean that the Liberals are out of the woods. Getting the first shipment of vaccine early is obviously, for them, good news. There’s no way around that. But they’ll need to keep vaccine flowing into Canada, and hopefully in much larger quantities, if they want to truly win this political fight (and, you know, save thousands of people). It’s easy to imagine a perfect partisan storm, where Liberals insist they get credit for Canada being an early recipient, while the opposition decries them getting only tiny, token amounts, while our allies vaccinate their population en masse. Both positions could well be true, in fact, leaving this entirely a matter of pick-your-narrative in line with your usual ideological preferences.

A few hundred thousand doses up front is great, but if summer rolls around and the Americans and British and Germans are getting back to life as normal while we cool our heels, the opposition will have plenty at which to throw stones. And that, frankly, was always the better bet, not to mention the most important milestone.

Small shipments of vaccine won’t be enough to end the pandemic; one of the still remarkably poorly understood dangers of COVID-19 isn’t the risk of dead old people, but sick young people.

A young person who experiences a bad bout with COVID is likely to survive, but hundreds of them all busily surviving at the same time in an ICU ward near you can collapse a hospital. This danger was clear months ago, but still seems to be a concept many Canadians struggle with. Small batches of vaccine will save the lives of the most vulnerable, which is great, but they won’t put our chronically overcrowded hospitals out of danger. Only a mass vaccination campaign can do that, and that will require tens of millions of safe, effective doses. There will be no return to normal until we clear that hurdle.

And it’s still possible that that will be a long time coming. Not certain — no one knows for sure. But the better measure of success for Canada, and its government, is and always has been securing enough vaccine to protect a huge percentage of the population, and quickly. If the Liberals fail to accomplish this, and come in well behind other peer countries, they should be held accountable for that.

Only time will tell. Getting a few hundred thousand doses early doesn’t tell us anything about how the rest of the campaign is going to go, but it’s undoubtedly a public relations win for a government that has been under intense pressure on this very issue in recent weeks.

It was strange to see our opposition so kindly set up the government for a foreseeable PR victory so early in what’s going to be a massive, months-long process, and one that was a lot easier to achieve than any part of what’s yet to come.

IT'S UNDOUBTEDLY A PUBLIC RELATIONS WIN.