Selley on Ontario’s aggressive vaccine rollout plan,

Province says 8.5 million will have shot by July

Retired Gen. Rick Hillier had some good news for locked-down Ontarians on Tuesday morning: The chair of Ontario’s vaccine distribution task force anticipates 8.5 million people will have two shots of Moderna’s or Pfizer’s best by the end of July. That’s significantly more and faster than federal government projections had thus far led us to hope for, and it brings promise of a significantly quicker partial return to normality.

Representing 60 per cent of the Ontario population, 8.5 million double doses certainly ought to be enough to protect every priority group, whether by dint of occupation, underlying condition or age: There are 5.6 million Ontarians over the age of 50, which is the demographic accounting for 83 per cent of hospital and ICU admissions and 99 per cent of fatalities, Canada-wide.

In deeply conservative and cautious provinces like Ontario, there will be voices calling for lockdowns until the last case is eradicated, vaccine be damned. But more reasonable voices will prevail. We don’t shut down society for things that kill one or three or five per cent of 15,000 people. We barely even notice most of them. Statistics Canada reports 6,893 deaths in 2019 from influenza and pneumonia.

An important caveat: Hillier’s projections are only good news if they’re grounded in good information. There is no reason to believe they aren’t, but no especially good reason to believe they are. The timing sure was advantageous: Hillier and the Progressive Conservative government that hired him for $ 20,000 a month took heavy fire over the weekend when it emerged the provincial vaccination program had shut down for three days over Christmas.

News of salvation by July also might help take the edge off Ontario Finance Minister Rod Phillips’ mind- boggling decision (a) to leave the country on Dec. 13, against explicit official advice not even to leave one’s home; ( b) to schedule various social media posts during his absence, including a holiday fireside chat, at the very least strongly implying he was here in Ontario; and ( c) upon being busted, to refuse even to say where he is. ( He eventually copped to vacationing on the ultra-luxurious and ultra- expensive French West Indian island of Saint Barthélemy, which could not possibly be more offside Premier Doug Ford’s “for the people” brand.)

Hillier admitted the threeday vaccination shutdown was an error. But in the cavalcade of potentially fatal errors Canadian governments have committed during this pandemic, it hardly rates. It has an entirely reasonable explanation: “In the long-term care homes and in the retirement homes, you’ve got staffs who have been running flat out for 10 months, looking after the patients that they love so much,” Hillier told reporters on Tuesday. Many of them took a couple of days off for Christmas, just like the rest of us — hard to fault them, surely. Moving residents safely to and from vaccination centres is a labour-intensive job. He decided a full- on pause was the best way to handle it all. That’s not a crazy conclusion to draw.

It’s impossible to conclusively quantify, but if a threeday delay in deploying the few thousand doses that Ontario had on hand last week winds up killing anyone, it will be a minute fraction of the number who died because of Ontario’s and Quebec’s wretched failure to safeguard long-term care homes even from the second wave of the pandemic. Or because of Ottawa’s patently insane early aversion to masks. Or because of the feds’ continuing suspicious of mass- testing options. Or because of a public health communications strategy that was totally unsuited to the long haul of a pandemic and that sometimes seemed deliberately designed to erode public confidence and trust.

A week has passed and Queen’s Park still has not articulated a plausible reason for suddenly abandoning its regional approach to restrictions, under which the entire north of the province went mostly unscathed and the city of Ottawa successfully flattened the curve twice over, and implementing its “provincewide shutdown” for two weeks, minimum. Ontario’s advice on who should and must and can’t get tested for COVID-19 has meandered all over the map, and its hapless chief public health officer, Dr. David Williams, has often seemed befuddled that people don’t take each new contradictory piece of information as gospel. Many of his colleagues in other provinces and cities also seem flummoxed when asked why their current advice and stipulations very obviously conflict with previous ones.

In an interview with The New York Times last week, the much- lauded Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that he had been crafting his messaging to the American public on vaccines and herd immunity according to his gut instinct about what people are ready to hear and how they might react to it. It was by no means an astonishing admission; it was just astonishing he would reveal this strategy right at the beginning of the vaccine rollout, when it could do maximum damage to his credibility, and the credibility of public health officials everywhere.

The COVID- 19 vaccine miracle ought to do wonders for pure science’s reputation. But if governments like Ontario’s hope to retain the respect of their constituents, people like Hillier better not write cheques they can’t cash. If we’re nowhere near 8.5 million vaccines by Aug. 1, he will have done himself and his bosses much more harm than good.