"Mandatory vaccines," taxes are just a distraction

Government leaders are floating the idea of "universal" vaccine mandates and taxes to divert your attention away from the fact they've screwed up our pandemic response

Every government needs an enemy to distract you from their failures. In this pandemic, our government has decided you are the enemy. (Bigstockphoto.com)

Last week, Quebec’s minister of health floated the idea of making COVID-19 vaccines “universally mandatory” – a step beyond the pale in a free democracy. A few days later, Canada’s federal minister of health came out in full-throated support of the idea. This week, Quebec upped the ante and proposed a special tax be levied to punish the unvaccinated.

Unlike workplace mandates, which are a workplace health and safety requirement, a law requiring everyone to be vaccinated is ridiculous: it offends every fundamental human right and democratic freedom, and it’s an impossibility.

Talk of a universal vaccine mandate accomplishes one thing: political misdirection. And politics is legerdemain, it’s sleight of hand, it’s getting the audience to follow your left hand as your right hand slips into the mark’s purse. And in politics, you are the mark. Always.

Universal vaccine mandates and anti-vaccine taxes have nothing to do with public health and everything to do with distracting you from blaming government for everything government has failed to do.

Every government needs an enemy. The governments of Quebec and Canada have decided the enemy is you.

When government ministers this week said “vaccination is the only way out” of the pandemic, make no mistake: they’re saying this mess is your fault, not theirs. You didn’t do enough. You didn’t get vaccinated enough, soon enough. You didn’t encourage your family, friends and neighbours to get vaccinated. You failed. They did not.

And, because, it’s difficult to get you to hate yourself, they’ve transformed a very small slice of the population into a convenient bogeyman: the evil un-vaxxed.

It’s easy to hate them. But, they did not cause this problem. There simply aren’t enough of them to make much difference.

Canada is already fully vaccinated.

If our plan requires 100% vaccination in order to succeed, then our plan is going to fail. That’s just a reality.

Achieving 100% vaccination is simply impossible. A year after the vaccination program began, 89% of Canadians eligible to get the jab have already gotten at least one. The number who’ve gotten two is lower at 81%. People are lining up for hours, in sub-zero weather, to get the the third shot. More of them would already be “boosted” if the government hadn’t forgotten how to do mass vaccinations rapidly. As a population, we are as fully vaccinated as we are ever going to be.

Of the 11% of eligible Canadians who haven’t yet gotten their first shot, a minuscule fraction of them are medically unable to tolerate the vaccine. Call that 1% of the total. That leaves 10% who simply refuse – or are too lazy to get the shot.

Of the lazy, a lot of them are younger Canadians who rely on their parents to arrange this type of thing – even if they’re over the age of 18 – and their parents simply haven’t.

We know from public opinion research that about 7% to 8% of Canadians can fairly be labelled “anti-vax” and simply refuse to get the shot. They’re not going to change their minds.

How would you impose a vaccine mandate on them? The threat of job loss and poverty didn’t sway them – they were threatened with termination if they refused to be jabbed; they refused and were fired. For cause. No severance pay. No employment insurance. No extended benefits. No safety net whatsoever. That’s a pretty stiff penalty. It didn’t sway them.

So, how then will government actually impose a mandatory vaccine on the unwilling? Nothing short of rounding them at gun point, beating them into submission with truncheons, strapping them to gurneys and forcibly injecting them with a vaccine is going to work. Will Canadians put up with this? I think not. We blanche at speaking harshly to people who steal bottles of alcohol in liquor stores.

Vaccine tax makes zero policy sense.

This week, Quebec announced it would tax the unvaccinated. For what purpose?

Anti-vaxxers are willing to live out their lives in unemployment and poverty. They aren’t going to change their minds because of a tax. Poor people don’t pay taxes. So, a vaccine tax is not going to move the needle on vaccine take-up.

Will an anti-vax tax raise enough money to help out a beleaguered health care system? Of course not. A tax might raise a million dollars. Our healthcare system spends that much on non-latex gloves before lunch.

So, there’s no rational policy objective for a vaccine tax. Government knows this. What, therefore, could be their motivation behind such a tax?

Simple. Our governments want to keep the public debate focused on vaccine mandates and vaccine taxes so that public anger remains focused on the few among us who refuse to be vaccinated. Every government needs an enemy. The un-vaxxed fit the bill perfectly.

Government is going to great lengths to divert your anger away from where it rightly belongs: on government.

The anti-vaxxers did not fail to modernize Canada’s (or Quebec’s) health care system for decades. That was a failure of government.

It wasn’t vaccine-deniers who failed to increase hospital capacity in the first two years of a global pandemic. That was a failure of government.

The jab refuseniks did not fail to order or distribute COVID-19 rapid tests, or build and maintain the capability to perform high numbers of PCR tests on a fast, reliable and efficient basis. That was a failure of government.

Throughout this pandemic – and for many decades before it – Canada’s governments, at every level, have failed to do the basic things required to minimize the suffering and impact of a pandemic. They failed to learn from past pandemics. They failed to plan for this pandemic. They to prepare for it. They failed to act when they could have.

This was not an “unprecedented” or “unanticipated” crisis.

This has happened before. As recently as 2003 right here in Toronto, in fact. From our SARS experience, we wrote numerous lessons-learned reports, then promptly didn’t learn any of the lessons they catalogued.

Not only could this pandemic have been anticipated, it was anticipated.

In fact, it was predicted in countless pandemic crisis plans produced for governments and corporations after 2003. I know this, because I wrote half a dozen of them. All of them were ignored by governments who didn’t even realize they existed.

Government wants us to think we are the problem. We are not.

Government ministers and senior public servants wants us to believe our neighbours are the enemy. They are not.

Anti-vaxxers are ignorant. Some of them are stupid. Idiots, even. But they did not cause the pandemic. They did not mismanagement. They are not our enemy.

The government is our enemy. And, we elected them.

Do you think the unvaccinated are the cause our our pandemic problem?