Who will rescue me from the depths of cynicism this pandemic has ensnared me in? The simplest solution, of course, would be not to watch things like the following, but trainwrecks and covidiots exert their own strange, pernicious pull.
My preoccupation of late has been with those who refuse to get vaccinated, people who blithely and recklessly pose a hazard to all of us. Not surprisingly, much of that ilk is also adamantly opposed to vaccine certificates/passports. And for some reason beyond my ability to fathom, their voices have been heard over those of sane people.
This, and a conversation I had yesterday, has led me to wonder about the documentation that will be required when Americans begin crossing into Canada on August 9. It is a date we should look upon with some trepidation.
Yesterday I walked over to a local store to buy some milk. En route, I ran into the manager of the garage where I take my car for servicing. As we chatted about Covid and related matters, he told me something one of his customers had relayed to him. Said customer has a cousin from the U.S. planning a visit. The cousin, an avid and rabid anti-vaxxer, said he has bought fake vaccination certificates online (most likely on the Dark Web, where they are readily available) for $75 each. Said customer told his cousin that he wouldn't be letting him into his house.
So the question is, what precautions are the Canadian government and Canadian Border Services taking to detect counterfeit certificates? Sadly, the answer is not especially encouraging.
Relying on questioning and 'intelligence' to ferret out the fakes leaves too much to chance. In its zeal to welcome back Americans, the federal government seems willing to put some of the gains we have made in our Covid battle at risk. I doubt the electorate would cheer such recklessness.
If you have been reading this blog lately, you will likely know the low opinion I hold of those who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Despite rising cases of the much more contagious and lethal Delta variant, the statistics regarding the vaccine-resistant barely change.
What is a sane, reasonably intelligent person to do, given that these people seem to be dictating the agenda?
Ontario’s public health units have done a bang-up job of getting us vaccinated. But there’s a stubborn percentage that won’t get the shots. With variants circulating and Ontario reopening, it seems plausible this unvaccinated part of the population could give us escalating case counts and — the real red flag to worry about — increasing hospitalization numbers.
If that does happen, a return to general lockdowns would be really hard to take. Those of us who dutifully followed the rules for more than a year and got our shots at the first opportunity will rightly raise hell if this government moves to restrict us again. The obvious thing to do instead would be restrict activities based on vaccination status.
Leave the province largely open for people who have received their vaccines. Limit activities for those who have made the choice to leave themselves more vulnerable to a virus that could overwhelm the hospital system again. And protect those, like young children and people with legitimate diagnosed health conditions, who remain vulnerable to COVID-19 and aren’t able to get vaccinated.
Unfortunately, here in Ontario, Premier Doug Ford has ruled out that option. Whether for reasons ideological, political or cognitive, he has said that he doesn't want a divided society, but that is exactly what he already has, and the problem will only get worse. With his own limited abilities, he may even think that restricting access to restaurants, movie theatres, nightclubs, concert and sports venues, etc. will hurt the commercial bottom line, but if another lockdown becomes necessary, that is exactly what will happen.
We are told by various experts that we need to cajole, empathize with and show compassion toward the recalcitrant. In my mind, once the carrot fails, it is time to wield the stick.
Vaccine passports are the best solution for our troubled times.
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.
