Ford sticks with experts on COVID moves

Mandatory vaccines, passports

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is facing increasing pressure to compel at least some unvaccinated Ontarians to get their COVID-19 shots, and yet the premier remains adamantly opposed to mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports. It's a surprising stance for a leader who has frequently erred on the side of caution.

Ford is not taking the easiest path, which would be to give in to those who want to keep living in a world of perpetual pandemic hyper-caution.

Instead, he's taking an approach that's more in keeping with the actual threat Ontario faces.

Ford is following the advice of chief medical officer of health Dr. Kieran Moore, who has explicitly said that the rising number of cases expected this fall is “not a cause for panic.”

In Moore's estimation, the province's high vaccination rate will curb the virus's numbers sufficiently to make the caseload manageable for the province's hospitals. For the 72 per cent of the population aged 12 and up who are fully vaccinated, exposure to COVID is unlikely to lead to more than mild symptoms.

While the idea of ordering people to get vaccinated is apparently attractive to many, even without drastic measures, Ontario's vaccination total continues to slowly climb. Thursday, the government reported nearly 50,000 additional doses were administered the previous day.

The province is moving to a new, more mature phase of its management of the pandemic. Moore acknowledges that COVID-19 will be with us for some time, but says we need to learn to live with it. “We have no desire to cause unnecessary disruption to people's everyday lives,” he said in an opinion piece this week.

This reluctance to disrupt our lives is new and refreshing.

We are slowly coming out of a period where government got to decide which businesses stayed open, which ones were “non-essential,” what goods businesses were allowed to sell, when we could get our hair cut, and even the direction we had to take when walking down aisles of stores that did remain open.

The vaccine passport promises a degree of freedom, but it is yet another type of restriction, one that would have a disproportionate impact on low income and racialized neighbourhoods. New data from Ottawa Public Health show those neighbourhoods have the lowest vaccination rates in the city. Public health says the reluctance is due to language, child care and transportation issues, lack of internet access and distrust of government. No doubt this is not unique to (the city of ) Ottawa.

Far from delivering freedom for the vaccinated, the so-called passport would mean that vaccinated people would have to show their papers to buy a shirt or get a beer in a pub. Is that the kind of society we want to live in? Once proof of vaccination becomes the norm, when would it ever end?

If further draconian restrictions are to be imposed, they should require proof of a real payback. What additional protection would be offered by having every health and education worker fully vaccinated? We don't know because no one seems to be able to say how many are vaccinated now.

What benefit would come from restricting the unvaccinated from certain businesses, when one is just as likely to encounter them at the grocery store or in the workplace?

Some business groups have come out in favour of vaccine passports as a way to prevent further lockdowns. Those shouldn't be the only two choices.

Rather, we need to accept that the continuing pandemic involves a degree of risk, although a pretty small one. For a fully vaccinated person, studies have shown that the likelihood of an infection is significantly less than one per cent. Overall, COVID-19's mortality rate has been less than two per cent.

The government is trying to switch emphasis away from the daily case count to focus on the number of people in hospital. It's a better measure of the severity of the disease. If someone tests positive for COVID but is either asymptomatic or has only mild symptoms, that's not a matter for great public concern.

Despite the urging of medical and long-term care professional associations that want mandatory vaccines for education and health workers and the clamouring for vaccine passports, Ford has resisted the temptation to make moves that would be popular, even if not useful.

The premier has long struggled to match government's response to the magnitude of the threat and he has not always succeeded. Barring a disastrous and unexpected change in vaccine performance, he has it right this time.

WE HAVE NO DESIRE TO CAUSE UNNECESSARY DISRUPTION.