Today there was Walk-in Wednesday to get the stragglers vaccinated at clinics in British Columbia. We’ll see how it fares.
Most likely there will need to be a Talk-You-Into-It Thursday, a Full-Court-Press Friday, a Spur-You-To-Come Saturday, and so on.
Sadly, the window has closed in which sound scientific evidence could have persuaded the skeptics. The fierce and fearsome campaign of misinformation has toppled what we are accustomed to experience as the ornate and organized flow of information. It has not helped, either, that authorities have had relatively little real-time data to support the clinical data about the vaccine, and that they haven’t been able to speak with one voice.
Officials are left with two choices: relatively passive encouragement to attend the clinics or the denial of privileges to those who, given one last chance to come in from the cold, choose to avert the jab.
What is clear is that the Great Canadian Shame-On isn’t going to work. It may make the righteous feel better to fulminate and demean nearly one-fifth of the eligible vaccine population, but debasing is a terrible public policy strategy in any circumstance. Even with lives at stake, officials could not portray matters in life-or-death terms with any success, because the unpredictability of the pandemic and the wavering of measures to mitigate its impact didn’t help build the properly confident circumstances for convincing argument.
It is disconcerting, of course, that those dodging the doses are clutching at straws scientifically.
Yes, yes, it is possible to have what we are calling a “breakthrough infection” if you’ve been double-vaccinated. The Delta variant is quite virulent, so it is possible to acquire a milder case of symptoms or be asymptomatic yet be quite infectious to others – even with two jabs.
In the pandemic, nothing is absolutely secure, so the anti-vaxxers have a point there, and it is fair to admit that the vaccines’ value is more in protection than in suppressing redistribution. By far, however, the serious illnesses are arising from unvaccinated people infecting other unvaccinated people.
What is more secure, though, are two doses of the coronavirus vaccine and some mild precautions like wearing a mask indoors with those whose vaccine history you either don’t know or know not to be yet effective – as in, the recently vaccinated. We might have been better off to sustain that provision provincially until we entered Step 4.
Instead our political leadership and health authorities have adapted their provincial approaches to more regional ones, an option recognizable many months ago in the pandemic. The question now is whether it can be contained and suppressed geographically.
The Delta variant is twice as virulent as the Alpha variant we encountered a year ago, which was twice as virulent as what we first encountered when COVID struck. The newly identified Lambda variant is to date proving quite resistant to vaccines in the lab, so be braced.
Some American and European jurisdictions have decided enough is enough and they’re reverting to restrictions indoors. We should have reason to believe we could be among them in British Columbia if our outbreaks do not subside within weeks.
And while the vaccines have solved the largest part of the safety challenge, science is still grappling with what happens to the unvaccinated children and the immunocompromised – and soon, even those with two jabs who it increasingly appears might need a third.
There remain six million eligible Canadians who haven’t done something simple to share in the public duty of protecting themselves and others. They either have their legitimate medical reasons to avoid the vaccines, deep-seated religious views about the general concept of vaccinations, or far worse, an acceptance of deception about the science that has led them down a horrible rabbit hole of anxieties and conspiracies – a worldview in which little is evidence-based.
There is fault in elements of the media, too – but not in journalism’s wider body of work – that permitted the spread of fake news across platforms and found people with titles who were disbelievers and could make a name for themselves in the landscape of abundant sources. It has taken too long to mount a credible cohort of influencers to reach into audiences that won’t normally digest official representatives.
The result is that we will hope to live with the consequences. Perhaps there will be privileges stripped from those who opt out of the vaccination program, perhaps their health insurance premiums will rise or their life insurance will be discontinued. But the realpolitik of the moment is that, on the eve of a federal election, no leader wants to rattle the chains of the one-fifth.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
