A great deal has been recently written in various media about vaccine certificates, both for and against their use. The arguments are pretty basic: such certificates should be required to enter restaurants, bars, movie theatres, etc. so that people know they are patronizing relatively safe businesses. The other side insists they are intrusive and violate people's privacy, that such coercive measures have no place in a 'free' society.
I have no use for the later argument, as this is an issue of public health. While I oppose mandating vaccines, I see nothing wrong with making life harder for those who don't give a damn about the lives of others. This is one of those rare issues that, in my view, is black and white.
The minority should not be permitted to tyrannize the majority. End of discussions.
Following is an assortment of letters to the editor that succinctly and effectively address this issue.
The first two letters, from The National Post, are a response to the dismantling of a website, safetodo.ca, which was started to list businesses that offered safe environments to patrons, either by indicating that all staff have been fully vaccinated or requiring proof of vaccination before being permitted on the premises. It was taken down due to a backlash against the businesses from the perpetually aggrieved anti-vaxxers.
Re: Businesses Attacked Over Vaccinated Status, July 22. In a free society, anti-vaxxers are entitled to boycott Safetodo.ca. But when dissent actively censors a website by forcing it to shut down over people sending personal, directed and hateful messages, then society must address such vandalism because it is clearly against the public interest.
Consequently, on behalf of society, including businesses, government should respond by setting up a similar site where knowledge of proof of vaccination is communicated. The government has the resources to withstand such an affront to our rights.
To submit to such a denial of our rights by allowing a vociferous minority to deny or cancel the free speech rights of the majority to advocate for free association with other vaccinated people on Safetodo.ca is an assault on all our rights.
Society must confront these anti-social outliers with our political will, medical knowledge and legal authority to save as many lives as possible. Safeguarding Safetodo.ca should be our civic mission statement for today, and the days ahead.
Tony D’Andrea, Toronto.
Just when you think that you have seen it all, this article about the attack on a website listing businesses that have fully vaccinated staff by a minority of hate-spewing, gutless anti-vaxxers, who remain anonymous on social media, proves that the world truly has gone mad. Kudos to Quebec for planning to issue vaccine passports in September. The majority of Ontarians will soon be fully vaccinated and I strongly urge Premier Doug Ford to do the same.
In a democracy the majority rules. The safety of all should never be trumped by a selfish minority.
Bob Erwin, Ottawa.
The last letter is from The Toronto Star, responding to a column by Martin Regg Cohn in which he opined that all people working in health care should be vaccinated.
When it comes to COVID-19 vaccinations, health and safety should trump job security, July 14
I completely agree with Martin Regg Cohn regarding vaccinations of all medical workers. However, this principle should be extended to all persons age 12 and above.
To me, personal privacy is trumped by the general good. Without a vaccine passport, a person still can order goods to be delivered to their home — just not go out to the stores to pick them up.
People have the right not to be vaccinated, but to attend physically is a privilege they have not earned without being vaccinated. Why should those of us that have been vaccinated be at the health peril of those not willing to protect their community?
Furthermore, a business that fails to enforce that its customers are vaccinated, threatening my health in the process, does not deserve my business.
No, I am not one of those who begrudge rich people their pleasures and pursuits. Content in my own life, I harbour no ill-will toward those who are better off than me.
I do become bothered, however, when those pursuits both distract us from, and add to, the existential crises our world faces. In that, the billionaires have much to answer for.
Take the recent 'groundbreaking' flights of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos into near-space and the breathless reporting that followed it.
Start at the 9:40 mark of the following to catch Stephanie Ruhle's breathless, (star struck?) interview with the Bezos boys:
Similar gushing interlocutions can be found online following Branson's Virgin Galactic foray, but I hope the above serves to illustrate that this kind of gushing, lionizing coverage serves merely as a bread-and-circuses diversion away from the many problems we face in our terrestrial sphere.
Now, were you to watch earlier in this broadcast, you would hear how Bezos also talks about seeing our planet from above and how fragile it really is. He opines we must do everything we can to protect our world, as if his space trip offered a transcendent experience.
And Branson, after his trip, said he wants to spend the rest of his life helping to solve our many problems here.
Apparently, those problems do not include our biggest threat, climate change.
Despite these intrepid innovators' claim that the greenhouse gas emissions from their excursions are no different from those from a jet flight, the truth is otherwise. First of all, both of their business models call for more and more of these inner-space trips, and as they scale up, the price will come down, making them more accessible to more people. Hence, more trips, more greenhouse gas emissions.
Secondly, the nature of these emissions is different from jet trips. Katherine Gammon explains:
Eloise Marais, an associate professor of physical geography at University College London... studies the impact of fuels and industries on the atmosphere.
The carbon emissions from rockets are small compared with the aircraft industry, she says. But they are increasing at nearly 5.6% a year, and Marais has been running a simulation for a decade, to figure out at what point will they compete with traditional sources we are familiar with.
“For one long-haul plane flight it’s one to three tons of carbon dioxide [per passenger],” says Marais. For one rocket launch it’s 200-300 tonnes of carbon dioxide carrying 4 or so passengers – close on two orders of magnitude more, according to Marais. “So it doesn’t need to grow that much more to compete with other sources.”
But the problem is more than simply the amount of carbon spewed, because
emissions from rockets are emitted right into the upper atmosphere, which means they stay there for a long time: two to three years. Even water injected into the upper atmosphere – where it can form clouds – can have warming impacts, says Marais. “Even something as seemingly innocuous as water can have an impact.”
Closer to the ground, all fuels emit huge amounts of heat, which can add ozone to the troposphere, where it acts like a greenhouse gas and retains heat. In addition to carbon dioxide, fuels like kerosene and methane also produce soot. And in the upper atmosphere, the ozone layer can be destroyed by the combination of elements from burning fuels.
When I was a boy, I imagined a future of endless possibilities. Each liftoff of the Mercury and Apollo missions served only to whet that imagination. But I grew up and saw an increasingly fractured world with no simple remedies.
Perhaps it is now time for these 'boys of space' to do a bit of growing up as well.
As a long-time visitor to Cuba, I have an ongoing interest in what happens in the island nation, as well as a deep respect for the resilience of its people. Despite having been exploited for centuries by outside powers, they have always found a way to work with the limited resources they have.
Cases in point: for years they have had a vaccine to treat lung cancer. They have also developed what seem to be effective vaccines against COVID-19. They provide free health care for all of their citizens, along with free education, up to and including university.
All of these feats, and many more, have been accomplished despite the crippling U.S.-imposed embargo that has been ongoing since 1962.
Despite that, U.S. news coverage has been focusing upon the large-scale demonstrations currently taking place in Cuba, protests prompted by food and medicine shortages. Most coverage is framed as an uprising against the government. The real culprit? The United States' intractable animus toward the Communist island.
The following demonstrates the bias in reporting:
I'm afraid Mr. Biden's expressions of solidarity with the Cuban people ring both hollow and hypocritical. The United States has the power to relieve their suffering but clings to the long-cherished fever dream of an overthrow of the government, one that would be replaced by a government just like theirs. (After all, who wouldn't want to be like the greatest nation the world has ever known?)
There is much more to be said on this topic, but I will leave you with the thoughts of a Star letter-writer from today's print edition who puts the blame squarely where it belongs:
Use of Miami Herald piece misrepresents reality in Cuba
Toronto Star
Re Thousands demand end of dictatorship in Cuba, July 12 With its source being the Miami Herald, the Star reports that “thousands demand end of dictatorship in Cuba,” although some sources put the number of protesters as “hundreds.”
Cuba’s population is estimated at 11,320,000 and I am certain that 99 per cent of Cubans see the U.S. stranglehold on them as more concerning than any other aspect of their difficult lives.
This past June 23, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution titled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”
This same resolution has passed the General Assembly every year from 1992 to 2021, that is for 29 years. This year, the vote was 184 in favour, two against (the U.S. and Israel).
A comprehensive economic embargo against Cuba was put in place way back in 1962 by the U.S. after its embarrassing defeat at the Bay of Pigs. It has remained in place. That followed the 1960 cancellation by the U.S. of the annual purchase of six million tons of sugar from Cuba.
It is not “chronic inefficiencies and paralyzing bureaucracy” that have eroded the country’s production capacity. Any country in the world, such as Canada, subject to an economic blockade by the United States for 59 years would be “in the throes of its worst economic contraction in over three decades” and suffering a plunge in foreign investment.
Why can the Toronto Star and Canada in general not recognize a huge bully gone berserk as he endlessly beats up the little kid who bested him in a game a long time ago in front of the other kids? This is no game. Millions of Cuban children and seniors are the victims as the U.S. collapses their world out of spite, while insisting it is acting on their behalf.
