What if the vaccine miracle never happened?
In many ways, COVID-19’S Omicron variant may be the first test of how Canada is going to learn to live with COVID-19. Lockdowns and social restrictions are very much still in play, and polls don’t indicate any widespread opposition to such measures. But there is strong anecdotal evidence that people aren’t willing to put their and their children’s lives on hold for much longer. The clamour for rapid tests may speak to that: People are willing to stand in line for ages for the opportunity to visit friends and family in relative safety.
If you ignore the basic facts of human nature, you could argue it’s far too early to consider “getting back to normal.” In the short term, we don’t yet know how Omicron will test Canada’s health-care systems. In the longer term, so long as there are huge countries with minute full-vaccination rates — it’s two per cent or less in at least four African countries totalling more than half-abillion people, for example — we won’t be able to say we’ve done our best to protect against future variants.
But there’s no point in ignoring the basic facts of human nature. “Our species evolved to be adaptable and resilient in the face of danger,” Mcgill University psychiatry professor Samuel Veissière recently told National Post’s Sharon Kirkey. “(We) thrived in the wake of actual catastrophes that were much, much worse than COVID.”
Indeed. And this utterly exasperates those Canadians who are still willing to hunker down just as they did a year ago. They see selfishness, motivated reasoning and outright misanthropy, and clearly there is some of that in play. But perhaps it’s worth considering a counterfactual scenario that we were being softened up for not so long ago: What if the vaccine effort had failed?
Even British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, an optimist well past the point of a fault, warned in May last year that a safe and effective vaccine was “by no means guaranteed.” It took 75 years to develop a Dengue fever vaccine, a very long article in the Guardian noted, and there’s still no AIDS vaccine — in part because it keeps mutating.
When then-president Donald Trump declared vaccines would be available by the end of 2020, smart people queued up to pour cold water on the idea. “Experts say that the development, testing and production of a vaccine for the public is still at least 12 to 18 months off, and that anything less would be a medical miracle,” NBC News reported.
“The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon,” The New York Times reported on April 30 last year. “Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years.” The Times quoted a medical school dean to the effect that biotech firms were likely overselling their chances in order to boost share prices.
U.K. grandmother Margaret Keenan received the first dose of Pfizer’s magic elixir just seven months later; just a couple of weeks after that, 82-year-old Oxford retiree Brian Pinker got the first dose of Astrazeneca’s version. The miracle unfolded from there. But what if it hadn’t? For one thing, I suspect Canadians would have had a much more enjoyable summer of 2021. Even understanding Canadians’ preternaturally cautious nature, I was astonished how many people I knew were still laying low even when case counts had tanked and the weather was begging for outdoor socialization. In a way, though, the vaccine miracle made that quite logical: If we just hold on for a bit longer, we can avoid any unnecessary risk and emerge smiling into the status quo ante.
Omicron reminds us how unlikely that is — COVID will be with us for the long haul — and maybe offers us a lesson: Make the most of the good times.
Absent mass vaccination, I also suspect Canadian governments would be under extreme public pressure to rapidly and permanently increase their health-care systems’ capacity, flexibility and efficiency. Even considering the vaccine miracle, it’s remarkable how little we’re talking about this.
To pick one example at random: Austria went back into full lockdown on Nov. 19 when it was seeing 1,459 daily cases per million population on a seven-day average. By contrast, Quebec closed schools, bars, cinemas and gyms on Monday at 378 daily cases per million. Effective Sunday, Ontario capped venue and restaurant and private-gathering capacities, among other restrictions, at just 130 daily cases per million.
No doubt those numbers bespeak very different societal risk tolerances, but it’s also true that Austria has almost three times as many hospital beds per capita as Canada — also more than twice as many doctors and 2½ times as many specialist surgical workers. Austria only spends slightly more on health care than Canada does.
In short, it takes a much larger COVID wave to swamp many of our peer countries than it does to swamp Canada. Knowing we’ll be dealing with this thing for many years to come, vaccines or no vaccines, the imperative to fortify our middling and wildly over-appreciated health-care systems is something on which we should all be able to agree.