Your right not to vaccinate will cost others their lives
Everyone should wear a face mask.
Everyone who is at greater risk for COVID-19 should wear a face mask.
Everyone who is in the mood for a face mask should wear one.
Everyone who isn’t in the mood to face mask will not have to.
As a result, one can walk along Bloor Street West in Toronto for whole blocks on a Sunday afternoon and scarcely encounter anyone wearing a mask, even at close range. The walk was so fraught that total strangers looked as if they were raring to bite each other. Best just stay home and let main streets turn into film set false frontages as stores close.
If we couldn’t even manage a face patch properly, how were we going to vaccinate successfully?
Let’s move on, past the fight over shielding one’s personal beauty from the hungry masses to where we are right now more than a year after lockdown truly began.
Everyone should be vaccinated. Everyone who is eligible should be vaccinated.
Everyone who is in the mood for vaccination should be vaccinated.
Everyone who isn’t in the mood to get vaccinated will not have to.
As a result, Ontario on Tuesday hit a high, a terrible one. It was the worst day for hospital intensive care admissions since the pandemic began.
There were 2,336 new COVID-19 cases. Ontario’s seven-day average for deaths is 14 daily. The numbers are stunning. From masks to vaccinations, Ontario has failed and is failing. I am running out of pejoratives and that never happens to me.
The idea that vaccines are available but Toronto Mayor John Tory has to beg older people to volunteer for what is readily offered, that whole neighbourhoods initially had almost no pharmacies taking bookings, that pharmacies are still warning people that their dates for second vaccinations are based only on hope, is hard to encompass.
In keeping with my policy of being as patient as possible under fraught circumstances, I am trying to understand how Ontario couldn’t cope. As the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn has written persuasively, why isn’t vaccination mandatory? You know, like the census.
Masking is mandatory but isn’t much enforced. Although people do play along with masking indoors, some quietly refuse, some leave it floating below their nose or chin. Who’s going to call a cop? As with vaccination, it is still largely a personal decision.
I do wonder if Canada is too polite to insist.
I don’t blame a federal government hamstrung by provinces run like individual nations in health care and education. We are a country that varies wildly. Imagine the wretched sorrow of finding yourself in Alberta when it voted for the inglorious Jason Kenney as premier, the thunk of your heart when you’re stuck in Fordland Ontario as death runs rampant. This won’t be good, you think. And it wasn’t.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce is a classic Doug Ford-type, the kind of hopeless, hapless MPP who embodies every classroom’s blankest teen. Imagine his essays. He has just condemned Ottawa for its “inconsistency of vaccine delivery,” the very thing that defines Ford’s weak and splattery vaccination plan.
Surely, the answer is to make vaccination mandatory, like filling out the census. Why doesn’t Ford do that? Explain. Perhaps Lecce could write 500 words — he must have them — on the subject.
Maybe it’s not timid government but management generally. Imagine hospital networks begging their staff to get vaccinated as if it were a moral option not to do it. No, you shouldn’t get vaccinated in the actual workplace — it is generally ill-advised to allow management inside your body — but hospitals surely have the right to insist.
Imagine knowing that you have handed yourself and your co-workers a chance at a death most painful. Who does that? More to the point, who thinks it should be done?
Americans are notoriously dim-witted about personal freedom, happily showing up at the Capitol in horns and furs to insist on it. I always thought Canadians regarded it as a duty, as in, “I suppose I have personal freedom but really isn’t it a bit irresponsible to insist on it at all times?”
Yes. It is.