There’s little chance that Danielle Smith’s plan to stop the government from ever again pressuring folks into getting a vaccine will work out. You see, every modern government has a pandemic plan until it gets punched in the face by the fear and the reality of a new worldwide virus. Then everything changes.
A tidal wave of fear swept away the WHO’s expert plans. For example, the WHO had determined in 2019 that it was “not recommended in any circumstances” to engage in contact tracing, or entry and exit screening, or to close any borders. But all those measures were rapidly put in place by countries around the world, along with coercive tactics to push vaccines once they were developed.
No one in Alberta was held down and forced to get a vaccine. But some private companies and government agencies suspended or fired workers who refused vaccination.
In September 2021, as doctors and nurses warned that new cases of COVID might break our medical system, then-premier Jason Kenney put in new public health restrictions, this time not on all Albertans, but only on the unvaccinated. They alone were barred from some public places, such as retail outlets and recreation centres, unless they had a recent negative COVID test.
Said Kenney: “We must deal with the reality that we are facing. We cannot wish it away. Morally, ethically and legally, the protection of life must be our paramount concern.”
I can’t see how any Alberta government would have resisted similar steps as Kenney took, not even if Smith had been premier then. Public pressure and the realities of a collapsing health-care system demanded strong action.
In that light, it strikes me that Smith’s vaccine plan is best seen as a signal to her most ardent supporters, the ones who flocked to her leadership campaign when she expressed her disdain for COVID public health restrictions.
NDP leader Naheed Nenshi makes a fair point when he characterizes Smith’s plan to amend our Bill of Rights as “nothing but desperate virtue signalling over issues that she thinks will help her leadership review.”
But Smith’s new vaccine plan — as she puts it “that no Albertan should ever be subjected or pressured into accepting a medical treatment without their full consent” — also demonstrates that she grasps just how much trust has been lost in our medical and scientific establishment and that she at least hopes to fight against the worst excesses in public health restrictions if she’s premier when another worldwide pandemic hits.
Folks will judge Smith’s plan here based on their own experience during the COVID pandemic and also based on their own fears about any future virus or vaccine.
As for me, I didn’t support folks getting fired because of their unvaccinated status, but I did support Kenney’s vaccine mandates as the lesser of two evils. Such a forceful and coercive action was evidently needed to keep our hospitals running and to prevent more ruinous and widespread restrictions on the activities of all Albertans.
Since that time I’ve seen several cases of moderate to severe reactions likely related to the vaccine, so I’m emphatically against new mandates for COVID vaccines and am leery of any future situation where new and relatively untested vaccines will be thrust on us.
Finally, I have some concern that Smith’s actions here might play into a growing movement against vaccines in general, though I suspect the damage in that regard has already been done with all the public health restriction flip-flopping and with aggressive push to force the vaccine on everyone, including on healthy and/or young people, whom public health experts said weren’t in any grave danger from the virus.
For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, so it’s no surprise to see bitter feelings and political action against the worst excesses in public health policy. But things will change fast in the face of a new and frightening virus. If the fear or the danger of such a virus is immense, so will be the outcry for the most severe of public health responses.