FAIL!... With a Side of Segregation?

FAIL!

Last night, Alberta's Premier declared a healthcare state of emergency, sent everyone back home again, and also announced the introduction of a vaccine passport scheme. I can't say I was surprised by any of this. The writing was on the wall toward the end of August as, little-by-little, ICU admissions to Alberta's fragile healthcare system began pushing it toward the breaking point. 

I've already written here about why I don't like passports as a solution. Have read nothing that changes my mind about them, but I knew that debate was essentially over by the time I penned the piece. Passports were already in operation in lots of places, so the collective acquiescence to them was bound to come here too. It's all dispiriting, but not, in my view, for the reasons I see expressed in the popular press or on platforms like Twitter. Instead, I view the resort to coercive measures like passports as an admission of complete failure on the part of our public officials to make its case to a significant portion of the population; roughly 20%-30% it seems. Importantly, this is not some sort of Alberta phenomenon. There might be greater skepticism and resistance in Alberta relative to the rest of Canada, but there are plenty of jurisdictions around the world in which the persuasive case in favour of vaccines appears to have stalled, or even failed. 

I am worried about what the inability to persuade significant numbers of people as to the virtues of vaccination says about our public institutions and where our politics are headed.

The public debate seems to want to focus on the failures of "leadership," as if that's the main problem. If we could just throw the current bums out of office, we'd have better leaders step into the void and more quickly turn the tide. Although I think leadership has indeed been in short supply, I don't leadership anywhere that inspires (spare me mentions of Ardern and Morrison-- better, but didn't get it right in my view). Instead, I see the FAIL here as something much more profound and dangerous. It seems as though we're trying to convince ourselves that what's holding up our return to "normal" are a contingent of MAGA-hat-wearing, QAnon, anti-science, loons; all of our problems would magically disappear if we could just deal with these people, right?

The MAGA crowd certainly exists, but it's also more complicated than that. As a recent piece in Vox noted, in the United States, politics is just one fault line along which the vaxxed and unvaxxed reside. Race and income are also big. African Americans and Latinos lag behind in vaccination rates, as do the poor; not exactly the stereotypical MAGA demographic. An equally murky picture of protesters has emerged in Europe; communists, far-right nationalists, conspiracy theorists of all kinds, etc. routinely mingle with a new common cause. 

Trust The Messenger?

Most unsettling is what appears to me to be a profound loss of trust in our leadership or faith in our institutions. None of this started with SARS-CoV-2, but it has unquestionably been exacerbated by it all. The anger and polarization on all sides are disturbing, but indicative of the corrosion of parts of our social fabric. This all might have been easier when we had media gatekeepers like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Peter Mansbridge, or Lloyd Robertson (I'll even throw in Knowlton Nash) filtering the news, shaping what we think. We live in a fractured, chaotic media environment in which it's very difficult to separate fact from fiction. That's a double-edged sword.

Pre-YouTube Influencer

Such an environment makes public messaging tough. Yet, our public officials don't seem to have kept pace with this evolving landscape. It's hurting them... and us. Pandemics are tricky things. But a lot of the public messaging we have been receiving has been contradictory, confusing, too heavily focused on fear, and overly dependent on vaccines as the ticket out. 

Take the last point, for example. I think our public health officials failed to properly explain what vaccines were engineered to do, allowed the public perception around "efficacy" to be focused on shielding from infection, and were blindsided by the "breakthrough" data that emerged last July prompting a confusing reversal of the CDC's masking and social distancing guidance. Moreover, the obsession with vaccines alone has glossed over any focus on FDA-approved therapies such as the monoclonal anti-bodies developed by firms like Regeneron or AstraZeneca. And, most importantly of all, there has been almost no public health messaging about the merits of healthier living generally; this in spite of the fact that obesity is thought to triple your risk of hospitalization or that the highest mortality rates are in countries with the most overweight populations. I think officials routinely underestimate the public's capacity to digest complex things, and then undermine themselves when overly-simplistic depictions turn out to be complicated. 

Segregation? OMG!!!

Public Safety, huh?

As I was perusing this morning's Edmonton Journal, I nearly spit up my coffee as I read a letter to the editor openly calling for the segregation of the unvaxxed. Segregation! Has it really come to that? Twitter is a cesspool of nonsense, but even I am shocked at the number of would-be autocrats who want the state to marginalize the unvaxxed. A couple of weeks ago, I dared suggest on Twitter that the long public health effort to push smokers outdoors and away from non-smokers was a flawed analogy to the push for vaccine mandates/passports. I stopped engaging with the onslaught after a couple of days. There were some thoughtful responses I genuinely appreciated. But the overwhelming majority was a kind of dismissive vitriol from a lot of angry, yet strangely anonymous, people who were more than ready to see the unvaxxed sent to the gulag.

It's early days of the passport scheme everywhere, but I've already seen clips of people being asked to leave restaurants, or business owners being put in the awkward position of having to say "papers please." They're anecdotes posted to social media, so context is missing. But the tensions within are hard to ignore.

The tenor of it all prompted me to pen a short letter to the editor that didn't make the cut-- I hope only because it was too long rather than not being reactionary enough. I thought I'd paste it here in the hope someone might read it. 

"Dear Edmonton Journal

There’s been a notable uptick in the level of anger over the frustrating course of the pandemic, more and more of it directed at the unvaccinated. I wholeheartedly share that frustration. People should get jabbed up. However, I’m alarmed by the rhetorical shift toward referring to our predicament as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated.” I’m particularly sensitive to binaries (Vaxxed vs. Unvaxxed) that over-simplify the problems we confront and, if recent vaccine uptake rates are any barometer, harden attitudes and constrain our thinking about how to handle them. Rights and liberties are not absolutes, and I bristle equally at those who talk about them as such. But our public discourse suggests we’ve become complacent about how easily hard-won rights and liberties can be frittered away. It’s fine to talk about restricting the rights and liberties of others until the list of those limitations lands at your doorstep.  We have just marked

Didn't Get Us Very Far

the end of two decades of conflict driven, in part, by anger, fear, and the rhetoric of “Us vs. Them.” The policy errors flowing from that simplistic thinking will be with us for a long time. I am also struck by the fact that our coarsening discourse on rights and liberties is taking place on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and appeal to everyone to give their thinking about all of this the sober consideration it deserves."

I get everyone's frustration. I got jabbed up for a number of reasons after reading a lot about how mRNA vaccines work. I am fortunate to not have any of the underlying conditions that SARS-CoV-2 seems to prey upon, so the vaccines were a little insurance policy against even mild illness. However, I also got jabbed with the expectation that everything would bend back in the direction of normal. It hasn't. Indeed, the goalposts keep moving. New variants, breakthrough infections, vaccination thresholds and, of course, the unvaccinated have all been proffered as reasons the rest of us are still effectively in jail. There always seems to be a reason to kick the "normal" can down the road. All the talk of boosters, passports, and what increasingly seems like an endless set of restrictions without end is getting harder and harder for me to rationalize to myself. 

Yet, far more worrisome than any of those outcomes is the angry, reactionary way we seem to be marching toward them.