Health-care workers deserve better protection

In the world’s conflict zones, reports of bombed-out hospitals and dead health workers are so common they barely make the news. In the past six years, at least 5,000 health-care providers have been attacked worldwide.

But bizarrely, the COVID crisis has sparked a rash of new harassment and violence against medical workers in countries that are rated as wealthy and advanced. Here, the enemy is within, and often operating without restraint.

In the U.S. this month a pharmacist and his family members were murdered by a conspiracy theorist in revenge for administering “poisonous” vaccines. In Canada, hospitals have been under siege from angry mobs protesting vaccination and mask mandates.

But although attacks on health workers are illegal under international law – it applies only to conflict zones. In Canada and the U.S., targeting health workers and hospitals with harassment and confrontations too often evades accountability as “peaceful protest.”

Alberta, a laggard in fighting COVID-19, is now amending a law to give health-care facilities legal protection as “critical infrastructure,” Quebec is levying fines up to $12,000 on anyone who intimidates or threatens people at those sites, or incites such protests.

All provinces should follow suit. But while Ontario stubbornly resists such measures, Toronto City Council has asked the police service to develop the city’s own rapid response protocol for addressing harassment and intimidation of front-line health-care workers and is exploring putting temporary “safe zones” around all health-care, vaccination and COVID-19 testing sites to keep them out of harm’s way.

These measures are urgently needed. Although medical workers in Canada and the U.S. are touted as “heroes,” they are increasing targets for abuse by belligerent “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-maskers” who have made their already overwhelming lives unendurable. After more than 16 months of patient deaths and punishing schedules, thousands are at the brink of breakdown. Health workers have described the protests as the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

In Calgary and Edmonton, mobs of protesters turned out to hurl abuse at health workers even as COVID brought hospitals close to collapse. Thousands of Canadian health workers are so burnedout they have left their jobs.

Canada is only one of many countries where health-care providers have been assailed during the pandemic. The International Committee of the Red Cross has reported more than 600 assaults against medical workers and institutions in 40 countries in the first six months of the pandemic alone.

But there are ways to mitigate this abhorrent behaviour if governments lead, rather than bowing to the splinter groups with the shrillest voices, and refuse to condone bullying by a misguided and misinformed minority.

First, there could be new federal laws to prosecute those who harass, threaten or commit violence against health workers. They are, after all, committing acts that endanger national security in ways that would quickly land political or religious extremists in jail. If the country is at war with COVID-19, they are aiding and abetting the enemy.

Although Canada has been sluggish in creating new laws to protect health workers, some other countries have not. India has sweeping new laws that make assault and harassment of health workers and blocking of medical facilities criminal offences.

Second, the anti-vax-anti-maskers who fight against those struggling to save their lives should receive war zonestyle treatment: a triage system of temporary shelters outside hospitals, equipped with cots for infected but defiantly unvaccinated patients — while the vaccinated, and those unable to take the vaccines would have the urgent care they need. The outliers would get attention if and when the overworked staff have time or opportunity.

Third, there should be a crackdown on disinformation that underlies much of the anti-vax/anti-mask campaign, spewed out from the internet, cable TV and social media. Much of it originates in the U.S. But agitators like People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier have also fuelled anti-vaccine protests. And deadly lies, repeated often enough, become “alternative facts” to the susceptible.

As fall and winter chill drive Canadians indoors, protest movements are growing, including hundreds of Ontario businesses that refuse to check vaccine “passports,” ensuring that COVID-19 infections will spiral. Exhausted health workers — the walking wounded of the pandemic — will need more than platitudes to support them.