Nothing can mask this level of ineptitude
Will we ever forgive the deliberately unvaccinated for having helped spread a disease that killed and disabled so many, devastating the economy, leaving many of us jobless and wretched?
Will we ever look on them gently when their casual choices left us unable to hold a loved one as she died? When a young woman with Stage-4 colon cancer had her surgery postponed for the third time because hospitals are packed with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients at death’s door? Death has an opendoor policy, never more so than now.
And will your children forgive you? The always humane Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper wrote about “disenfranchised grief,” a psychological term to describe the feelings of mourners who keep quiet about their suffering because the cause of death is stigmatized. Can a little girl tell people that her unvaccinated dad died of COVID-19?
For each unvaccinated American death, Kuper says, about nine people lose a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse or child. But a child’s suffering is greatest. Children come first with all of us. Don’t they?
“Imagine the fear, stress and confusion of a child being raised by anti-vaxxers now,” Kuper writes. “The virus is everywhere like never before and is slaying people around you. It would be natural to start wondering whether the rest of the world is right and Mummy and Daddy have joined a death cult. It’s an experience that may set these children apart into the 22nd century.”
Canadian journalists, perhaps out of civility, have hesitated to hit hard on unvaccinated patients. But the CBC reports that between Dec. 14, 2020, and Dec. 18, 2021 — one full terrible year — about 80 per cent of people hospitalized with COVID-19 and 76 per cent of those who died were unvaccinated.
In the ICU at Toronto General Hospital, CTV’s Avis Favaro reported, 70 per cent of COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated. When someone sneered on Twitter that this meant 30 per cent of them were vaccinated, Favaro replied, “Doctors say they have immune disorders, some are transplant patients or are more elderly where even two doses don’t work well enough.” None in the ICU she reported from were triple vaccinated.
The fervently unmasked attack the masked in public, often violently or in racist terms. We see it on airplanes, at corner stores and on the subway, citizen journalists compiling mixtapes of ugly scenes, the kind of thing you will find in museums 50 years from now showing how humans behaved in 2022.
This week we finally heard about a masked customer threatening an unmasked couple in a Port Elgin store. He allegedly smashed their tail light, which was deplorable but perhaps a preview of what the vaccinated think of the anti-vax creatures howling outside hospitals, invading stores and terrorizing politicians in their homes. You’re awful, we think.
Anecdotally, I have twice walked out of crowded grocery stores at Bay and Bloor because they didn’t enforce masking. Packed with rich people, it is the rudest intersection in the city. I see screaming abuse, car crashes, honking and physical attacks.
This week I saw a man of obvious wealth shop with his flimsy blue mask pulled under his chin. I asked a staffer to talk to him. The nice, teenage, lightly paid shelf-stacker walked past a rich man twice his size and pretended not to notice the man’s bare face. He was scared to confront him.
I felt horribly ashamed for having asked him in the first place.
It was the store’s responsibility, not the boy’s. The store didn’t do it. It was Premier Doug Ford’s responsibility to get everyone vaccinated, N95-masked, and kept safe in schools, on transit, and in the cities and towns of Ontario. He didn’t do it.
I watched Education Minister Stephen Lecce do a TV double-act with public health official Dr. Kieran Moore, both still in primitive cloth masks which they took on and off as if they didn’t understand how air worked.
It looked like the “Idiots Are People Two!” episode from “30 Rock,” with people demonstrating against the stigma of being stupid. “We are idiots! For all intensive purposes!”
Lecce campaigned, claimed Ontario was doing better than other provinces. We don’t care. Moore said pediatric vaccinations were untrustworthy, then backtracked.
With a team of this quality, it’s clear that Ford will never tax, punish or even make life uncomfortable for unvaccinated people. Quebec, full of customary angry verve, will take action. Ford will bumble.
We have suffered grievously for two years. The third year creaks forward.
But Ford will not punish the unvaccinated, the dim, the cruel, the easily led, the mean-eyed people who cherish the freedom to harm others. Does he consider them his base? If so, who speaks for the rest of us?
The Ford government had a duty of care. It failed us with its lassitude, mendacity and honed incompetence. On every crucial issue, this time the penalizing of the unvaccinated, it has taken the fetal position, curled up, eyes closed, saying not yet not yet not yet.