Protesters already have freedom; they’re using it to make things worse

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/02/2022 (1055 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Note to the freedom convoy: your pursuit of individual freedom is killing the rest of us.

Admittedly, if you were to plug that statement into rhetoric spectrum — which ranges from mildly bombastic to dangerously inflammatory — it might be closer to the latter than the former. However, that doesn’t make it inappropriate or inaccurate.

As trucks and farm equipment pour into downtown Winnipeg to protest vaccine mandates, the greatest threat facing the slim but still significant unvaccinated minority is, and will continue to be for some time, serious illness, hospitalization and death from COVID-19.

However, the greatest threat facing the rest of us is our inability to obtain the life-saving and life-sustaining health care we need, when we need it, because the health-care system is overwhelmed trying to care for the unvaccinated.

Delayed surgeries and interminable delays for diagnostic tests. Longer wait lists to see medical specialists. Fully vaccinated Canadians have stopped worrying about whether they’ll get seriously ill from COVID-19, and have started to lay awake at night worrying what will happen to them if they develop some other health issue that, while not emergent, still requires comprehensive medical attention.

Surgical and diagnostic backlogs have already reached the point where both government and advocates for action, such as Doctors Manitoba, agree it will take several years to alleviate. Those consequences, in terms of suffering, quality of life and, in some cases, death are almost impossible to calculate, although we certainly know there already has been and will continue to be infirmity, chronic illness and loss of life due to pandemic pressures.

The supporters of the freedom convoy will deny their role in this situation. But on a global scale, the statistical trends are consistent and compelling: while the unvaccinated represent slightly half of all new infections due to Omicron, they account for more than 70 per cent of hospitalizations and deaths.

Faced with overwhelming evidence that they are bringing health care to its knees, how do the freedom fighters respond?

A truck pulling a trailer full of hay bales that rolled through Winnipeg Thursday, the day before convoy protesters surrounded the Manitoba legislature, carried a sign that claimed vaccine mandates “won’t fix health care.”

Of all the silliness that has been uttered in the name of the convoy, that has to be the silliest.

Health care in this country, and in this province, definitely had its challenges prior to the arrival of the pandemic. In Manitoba, austere management and funding by the Progressive Conservative government left the heath-care system vulnerable to a crisis such as COVID-19.

However, acknowledging the system’s shortcomings is not, in any way, an acknowledgement that systemic issues are responsible for backlogs and delay in obtaining treatment. Our health-care system, particularly that part of it that lives in our network of hospitals, is severely crippled. Perhaps even permanently crippled, in large part because of the burden of the unvaccinated.

Unvaccinated people, particularly those who are trying to turn their aversion into a political movement, will deny that this is the case. And yet, the data on hospital admissions and deaths is clear and unambiguous: you don’t get vaccinated, you get sick. So sick that you need to jump the queue for medical treatment and in so doing, deny others.

This truth is even more maddening when you consider that the rhetoric coming out of the freedom convoy, among other sources, is eroding faith in vaccines.

Anti-vaccination advocates love to revel in the fact that Omicron, the latest COVID-19 variant, produces way more breakthrough infections than previous variants. This, the protesters claim, is proof the vaccines are not effective.

That is dangerous nonsense.

When vaccines were first introduced just over a year ago, there were two major promises. First, vaccines would prevent infection in most, but not all, of the people who got vaccinated. And second, that in those instances where there were breakthrough infections, the symptoms would be milder and the incidence of death greatly reduced.

Those two promises are worth revisiting. They confirm that, contrary to the anti-vaccine naysayers, breakthrough infections in vaccinated people have always been a threat; none of the leading COVID-19 vaccines has ever provided, or claimed to provide, complete protection against the novel coronavirus.

The original promises also confirm that even though breakthrough infections are much higher with Omicron, vaccines are still providing protection against serious illness and death.

That is a point totally lost on the protesters outside the Manitoba legislature.

Of course, it’s become abundantly clear the freedom convoy protesters are more upset that government is trying to force them to get vaccinated than than they are about getting vaccinated. They don’t trust government, and anything it wants them to do is simply a non-starter. It’s very hard to provide an antidote for that kind of condition.

The question most vaccinated people are asking themselves now is whether protest and stubborn refusal is the hill the freedom convoy supporters are prepared to die on.

Based on the signs plastered on trucks and farm equipment in downtown Winnipeg, the unvaccinated are not only willing to die on this hill, they’re prepared to take as many vaccinated people with them as they can.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com