Pro-vaccination businesses attacked

Online harassment seen as co-ordinated effort to target places publicizing status of staff

WATERLOO REGION — Local groups and organizations that have publicized their staff are fully vaccinated have been attacked on social media by anti-vaccination groups.

Graeme Kobayashi, who owns Counterpoint Brewing Co. in Kitchener, said he received “a ton of flak” from antivaccination advocates after he had his business listed on the website safetodo.ca. that let people know all staff at the site had been vaccinated.

“There were comments about boycotting our business,” Kobayashi said, as well as a negative online review that “came out of the blue.”

Other local businesses declined to comment on the issue after being harassed for publicizing that their staff had been vaccinated against COVID-19.

That harassment led the safetodo.ca website to shut down after less than a week, because some of the listed businesses were being attacked on social media, and because the site creator received “a significant number of personal hate messages,” including one that warranted contacting police.

“The messages have become increasingly personal, directed, and hateful,” read a post on the safetodo.ca Twitter thread.

“Whenever I add a new business, there is a group of people (a small minority), who attack those businesses by leaving fake Google reviews, making false bookings at their restaurants, and sending hateful messages to them. I cannot, therefore, in good conscience continue to add businesses to the website, because I cannot be certain that they will not be attacked by the same people,” the online post read.

The attacks are “quite disturbing,” said Anne Wilson, a psychology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University who studies political polarization.

Social media enables the perpetuation of misinformation about vaccines, and people who are opposed to vaccines may be feeling more threatened with public discussion of vaccine passports and travel limits on the unvaccinated, Wilson said.

The safetodo.ca site was set up as a resource to help people with compromised health, or who are hesitant to go out in society for fear of contracting COVID-19, by providing information easily accessed in one spot.

The anti-vaccination movement misunderstood the intent of the website and of participating businesses, “and it just blew up from there,” Kobayashi said.

“We’re not asking people for proof of vaccination. We did not force our staff to get vaccinated,” Kobayashi said. “It was more just information dissemination, so that people are aware that we’re quite careful and want to keep everybody healthy.”

The attacks were “a very coordinated campaign by antivaxxers to silence and stop these attempts to create safer spaces,” particularly for people whose health makes them more vulnerable to serious impacts from COVID, said Shana MacDonald of the University of Waterloo, one of the lead researchers on a new study on vaccine hesitancy.

The loss of a useful resource is unfortunate, MacDonald said, and the attacks on businesses that are simply trying to reassure people “is really heartbreaking.”

Restaurants and other small businesses have suffered enough over the course of the pandemic, and the last thing they need is to be subjected to “dirty tactics,” said Nick Benninger, the chef and owner of Fat Sparrow Group, which owns several local restaurants, including Taco Farm, Jacob’s Grill and Stone Crock.

“It hurts a lot,” Benninger said. “We’re in the business of hosting people.”

Benninger is a strong advocate of vaccination, and is one of the faces on Waterloo Region’s “What’s Your Why?” vaccination campaign, but said he prefers to keep the vaccination status of his staff private.

But attacking people and businesses, especially after 18 months that have been difficult for everyone, isn’t helpful, he said.

“I think the overall message here is just to be kinder to people,” Benninger said. “If you don’t like a message that a business is putting out there, it’s really easy to ignore it, or unfollow them. You can vote with your wallet. You don’t need to vote with your hatred and ignorance.”

The Kitchener Waterloo Chamber Orchestra did not receive any comment, either positive or negative, after it chose to be listed on safetodo.ca, said board chair Elizabeth Newman.

The orchestra’s board approved a policy to require all musicians be vaccinated, mainly to assure the 40 or so musicians who play with the orchestra “that they have a physically — and emotionally — safe working environment,” Newman said.

“We’re proud of the stance we took. We thought it was an important thing to say,” she said. “We’re a community-based orchestra, and I think we have to do things with the community in mind.”

The current concern of some about vaccinations reminds Newman of when seatbelts were first made mandatory in 1976.

“Everybody thought that was a major infringement on their rights, but there’s very few people now that would get into a car without automatically doing up their seatbelt,” Newman noted.