I used the term "stale dated pandemic-related issues" on a recent post, and I shouldn't have. When I wrote that, I had in mind the signs warning against the harms of COVID vaccines, and not about the continued medical restrictions on real people today.
As I've said lots, that sign is stale-dated because anyone who took the vaccine has already taken it and everyone who hasn't, won't. There's no one left to save.
What I wasn't thinking about is the continued vaccine mandate in BC for some public employees. Some of the comments on here pointed that out, but it was a private message that really made me feel the angst these restrictions caused and were causing. BC is the only jurisdiction in Canada that still require vaccines for some public employees and refuses to hire back the unvaccinated, and even many doctors mutter privately under their breath about it. Since there are no major outbreaks in the other nine provinces that have lifted the restrictions, it isn't clear what the justification is to keep them in effect here in BC.
On vaccination
My own personal thoughts on the COVID vaccine are that it was over-hyped and under-delivered, but even if every single anti-vax study is 100% correct, the benefits of the vaccine are greater than the risk.
That's my opinion, and I believe it can be backed by hard data, and that's why I chose to be vaxxed, several times. I'm glad I did, and I certainly am not going to apologize for it.
I'm an advocate of vaccines of all kinds (yes, I know this vaccine is different etc.).
I believe we've forgotten the diseases of our ancestors, and with them the memory of the anguish and heartache of losing children, husbands and wives, sometimes entire villages. Smallpox, polio, a host of Asian diseases...sometimes some of them even struck as widespread plagues, as Indigenous people are well aware. And all of these diseases are gone. Even measles, which was prevalent well within living memory, was defeated because of vaccines. Whatever the characteristics of the COVID vaccine, I believe it represents the best efforts of a lot of good people to produce the best result they could to protect their society. I know some people don't want to hear that, but this is what I think of vaccines.
On vaccination mandates
I CHOSE to be vaccinated. That's a very different thing from being forced to take the COVID vaccine. To anyone who believes, like our PM, that no one was forced to take it, I would say that being deprived first of the ability to socialize and then of the ability to even make a living qualifies as pretty damned close to 'forced'. It involved social ostracization and literal medical apartheid more reminiscent of medieval leper shunning than 21st century medicine, and it was coerced by the state. It was wrong then and I said it was wrong then. I said at the time that our children will look back on firing non-compliant employees at the city with shame, or at least wonder what the hell we were thinking.
We heard early in the pandemic that Sweden was irresponsible for offering advice rather than restrictions to its citizens. In fact, at times the anger directed at Sweden verged on hysteria. When I wondered publicly, as a city councillor, whether social stress and economic carnage might be avoided by laying off the mandates and lock-downs and instead following Sweden's lead, a local doctor lifted into orbit, leveled a public condemnation at me, and wrote the mayor, who obligingly took to the media to decry "irresponsible ideas." It was fun times.
The international media watched the Swedish daily death tolls hungrily and reported each relative blip in Sweden's mortality rate, waiting with bated breath for a great plague of COVID to sweep across the country. It took longer than expected, so while the media waited, they spent the time eagerly reporting the fact that Finland's per capita death toll was lower, entirely ignoring the fact that Finland has half the people that Sweden does, even though both countries occupy about the same size land mass. In any event the Swedish plague never arrived, and the media drifted away out of boredom.
In the end, Sweden came in at about the middle of the European pack, with a lower per capita death toll than a bunch of the more severely locked down countries. Enough of the population took the advice they were offered by the government and used common sense precautions, and the results were about the same as anywhere else. Not surprisingly, with few restrictions and no vaccine mandates, Sweden had a relatively high rate of European vaccine uptake, while most of the heavily locked down countries had much lower compliance. And Sweden ended the pandemic with none of the drama, the destroyed livelihoods, the inflationary spending, the protests that still linger on, or the Covid vaccine restrictions in BC.
I'm all for vaccines and very much against vaccine mandates specifically and government coercion generally. I think the current Ottawa political culture thinks we're all helpless idiots who need to be protected from ourselves, but I think they're wrong. I think Canadian society, left to its own devices, produces an innate common sense that I trust more than some of the ideological idiocy I see coming out of some faculties in the academe, especially lately.
As Churchill is alleged to have once said, 'no matter how beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results'. The results of paternalistic, soft-authoritarian governance suck and its time for a change.
Scott Anderson ... is a North Okanagan business
owner, former two-term City Councillor in Vernon, interim Leader of the BC
Conservatives. He has a first-class honours degree in international relations
and philosophy and has done six years of graduate work at the University of
British Columbia in strategic studies. He has also served as a military officer
(Captain) with the British Columbia Dragoons, an armoured reconnaissance unit
based in Vernon and Kelowna, and later with the CAF Public Affairs Branch based
in Ottawa.
He has put his name forward as a nominee candidate for the Conservative Party of
Canada (CPC), for the new federal riding of Vernon-Lake
Country-Monashee.
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