John Robson: Canadians Want Their Government to Treat Them Like Adults

Commentary

Talk about a shot in the dark. A new Public Health Agency of Canada report says endless insulting government propaganda and legal coercion on vaccinations made people trust them less. The vaccinations, I mean, though also I suspect the government. Whatever might the solution be?

“Childhood Immunization Coverage Survey Among Key Populations” found that half of parents have doubts about safety, and quite a few about effectiveness, we learn from Blacklock’s Reporter. Being a Canadian government study, it went heavy on “Key Populations” like “2SLGBTQI+ and Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) Parents” but did include whatchamacallit, the boring other ones, “General Population Parents.” But we need not be detained long by identity politics.

What matters most is that the bullying, ignorant way the state forced us all to get vaccinated and sought to crush dissent sowed distrust for some unforeseen reason, causing both medical and broad social harm. It’s bad that people are skipping vaccines they should trust, and worse that they’re retreating into paranoid isolation because of authorities they shouldn’t.

I myself got called an anti-vaxxer for raising doubts, which was characteristically obnoxious and obtuse given my personal vaccination history. Indeed, though I generally skip flu shots, let me confess to having just discovered, due to a recent trip, that I’d had a bit too much faith in vaccines.

Not about general effectiveness. But having been vaccinated in my distant youth against horrors from polio and typhoid to Hib and whooping cough, I’d naively assumed I was permanently covered. In COVID debates I’d even cited life-long efficacy as a good test for separating real vaccines from bogus ones.

Not so. Being one of those chumps who checks his assumptions, I learned that they do wear off, some faster than others. For instance, both typhoid and meningitis apparently need to be redone in three years. You don’t say.

They do say. Meaning a lot of the protection we enjoy is from fragile herd immunity. Because nobody currently has them due to pervasive childhood inoculation, nobody gets them once their immunity silently wears off. Unless they go somewhere unsafe without checking their assumptions. Or we let in lots of people from somewhere unsafe without checking their health. But would the Canadian authorities commit such a blunder?

They might well. They certainly did over COVID, from telling us to rush out to Asian restaurants to making us stay home for years and arresting us for going to a park alone, clobbering kids academically and socially. And saying masks were useless, then essential, while pivoting from the experimental vaccine utterly preventing COVID to saying we must get it every three months and would get COVID anyway, and anyone who asked questions was an enemy of the people.

As usual, they had far less knowledge or wisdom than self-conceit, and reacted to criticism with gutter politics, not adult conversation. Including, as on climate, trashing skeptics as “not a scientist” while hailing loudspeakers for orthodoxy who barely scraped through Grade 10 biology as sages.

Some vaccine zealots even announced their infection after six shots, with apparent weird pride in their skill at doublethink. But this approach turned out to be a major blunder because somehow it undermined trust. And not only because we still don’t know how safe the COVID vaccines were.

We don’t. No mRNA vaccine had ever been approved anywhere for general use, and as scientific research in Canada is essentially a state-funded enterprise and pronoun-of-your-choice who pays the piper calls the tune, it is still doubleplusungood to investigate either the efficacy or safety of those shots. But here’s something we do know, or should, and should be able to discuss like adults.

Nothing is totally safe. Life, in fact, is 100 percent fatal. And my trip was far from safe, while getting the various vaccines, boosters, and pills was also risky. I laughed off warnings that one possible side effect was fatigue, life having already delivered that one. But I didn’t deny possible irritating minor complications or catastrophic major ones. I simply figured the latter were far more likely from the diseases and took my medicine, in rapid succession as time was short, while avoiding doubling up on live vaccines. It’s how grown-ups make decisions.

Here I still am, obviously, so I won my bets. I cannot know whether I would have gotten ill otherwise, with what or how badly. But you pays your money and takes your choices (including, on some vaccines, hefty fees in this land of “free” health care). And if governments don’t want us to treat them like obnoxious idiots, they should avoid the risk from treating us that way, on everything from climate to identity politics to vaccination.

Possible side effects include resentful loss of trust.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.