What Happened to Us?

A two-year old child, with a laundry list of underlying conditions, died from COVID-19 last week. Upon hearing the statements released by our Premiere and Provincial Health Officer, I cried. I cried for the child and for the child’s family. I cried because our premiere did not once mention the word ‘tragedy’ but instead jumped straight into casting aspersions at his citizens. I cried because our politicians refused to take their share of responsibility and acknowledge that they have not done enough. I cried because I thought Canada was not prone to the type of callousness, fear mongering and devoid-of-reason remarks being made. Dr. Bonnie Henry, our provincial health officer, explained that the child “had a number of health issues” but that they “received the best possible care they could at Children’s Hospital”. Obviously not. John Horgan, our lovely Premiere, took to the podium and outlined how, to him, the death of a toddler with several underlying conditions “is a graphic reminder of how susceptible WE ALL ARE to the ravages of COVID-19”. No, John, it’s not. A toddler—who lacks a fully developed immune system but does have a number of underlying health conditions—dying from COVID-19 while under the care of health professionals is a tragedy (to us, maybe, but not to John Horgan), but it is not a reason for healthy adults with strong immune systems and a first dose of the vaccine to continue living in fearful isolation. Of course, for premiere Horgan, the death of a child is merely a political opportunity.

Predictably, the announcement of this child’s tragic death was accompanied by updated travel restrictions and lockdown extensions, the do-nothing nature of which I will touch on momentarily. Surprisingly, the press conference also included a report by Dr. Henry that there had been “no new outbreaks this weekend” and that the most recently reported outbreaks were being managed and contained. So, if there are no new outbreaks, and the ‘circuit-breaker’ restrictions which should have expired on April 20th are now being extended to the May long weekend, how has this tragic death of a child still managed to occur? If the ‘circuit breaker’ restrictions were deemed effective enough at curbing the spread over these past three weeks to be extended, and yet at-risk children are still dying, then who is really letting whom down? Why are us citizens bearing the brunt of the responsibility? Why are we being reminded of the severe nature of this virus when it is clearly not us who have failed to protect this child? It seems quite obvious to me that either the child’s caretakers made a mistake, or else the government restrictions we currently have are not stringent enough. I highly doubt that droves of beach-going twenty-somethings ambushed this child and coughed in their face. So how, then, did this toddler contract the virus? Someone let them down, and it’s not the general population. The refusal of our politicians to accept any responsibility for this tragic death is astounding. They feigned disgust at the normal human behavior of low-risk persons who have been sacrificing and compromising for over a year, while simultaneously refusing to wonder aloud “what could WE have done to better protect this child?”

Perhaps I am looking through the rose-colored glasses of youth, but I don’t recall growing up under a government this calloused and irresponsible. My childhood was full of cooing—from both Canadians and foreign nations—about the greatness of Canada. We were America with fewer guns and more government support. This pandemic has exposed that as a falsehood. I would say that I fear government overreach, but that’s not it exactly. What I fear—what I think all Canadians and British Columbians should fear—is the opaque and nonsensical application of governmental authority. I argued a moment ago that our province needed more restrictions. I believe that. This pandemic should be in our rear-view mirror by now. I would have been in favour of a full three-week lockdown at this time last year, when the data from Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan (where there have been only seven deaths from COVID) emerged. We should have followed their lead and fully locked down for a month. Instead, we chose to follow the U.S. approach of ‘ride the waves until we have a vaccine’. The only flaw in that strategy is that we lack the massive vaccine production capabilities of the United States. Why are we following them, when three nations that are more similar to ours proved the effectiveness of a full lockdown over a year ago? I have no problem with government intervention. I do not stand on the ideological, Republican soapbox of ‘freedom’. What I do have a problem with is my government failing to correct their mistakes or take responsibility for them while they simultaneously contradict themselves and detrimentally suppress programs and activities that are actually useful in the interest of optics and conserving power.

Last week, a pop-up vaccination clinic at the Hollyburn Country Club was shut down by Vancouver Coastal Health, our local government health authority. The shutdown came on the heels of Dr. Henry’s April 19th comment that “vaccination has proven to be one of the most powerful tools that we have” because “immunization can get case rates to our post-pandemic levels and this is what we need to focus on for the next five weeks”. So much for that. The clinic, offered by the club to its staff and members, was portrayed as elitist, unacceptable and appalling. Mary-Ann Booth, West Vancouver's mayor tweeted, in a textbook virtue signal, that she had cancelled her membership to the club. How brave of her! Let's have a round of applause. Queue eye roll as you read that she—a member of Hollyburn, which places her in the top 1% of BC wage earners—took advantage of her privilege as a politician to get vaccinated in early April.

The fascinating thing about this is that experts estimate the community on the Downtown East Side (Vancouver’s most poor and underprivileged area) has reached approximately 90 percent immunity. Great care was taken—at the beginning of the vaccine rollout—to inoculate the most at-risk populations in the province. Add to that the fact that Hollyburn was only offering doses of AstraZeneca to staff and members who were born between 1956 and 1981, and would thus be eligible for the vaccine by now anyway, and you have a lovely taste of socialism in the making. In a rare and ironic toss of the dice, the very wealthy drew the short straw and were discriminated against. Funny enough, the wealth of these would-be vaccine-getters seems to be the primary focus of the story. Every article I’ve read covering the incident mentions the $40,000 initiation fee to the club, while one article even stretched the truth to claim such fees are in excess of $60,000. Why should we care? Most at-risk populations have been vaccinated already and Hollyburn’s doses came in the form of a donation, so there was no line-cutting or shady backroom deal being made. Why should people be denied health care because of their economic status? Why, in the middle of a massive health emergency, is a democratic government telling its citizens “you do what we tell you, when we tell you to do it, and nothing else”?

The AstraZeneca doses were donated by Ken Lee, a pharmacist at the Indigo Pharmacy in New Westminster. He has previously partnered with Hollyburn for flu shot clinics and—when he realized that his pharmacy lacked the space to socially distance vaccine-getters and safely run a clinic out of—decided to reach out and partner with them again. Ed McLaughlin, the CEO of Hollyburn and organizer of this pop-up clinic, is now fighting for his job. Despite heeding the incredibly vague advice of Vancouver Coastal Health—whose employees have mostly been vaccinated and who simply deemed Hollyburn’s actions ‘unacceptable’—and scuttling the clinic, a petition has been created calling for his immediate removal as CEO. The petition attempts to paint him as an elitist line-cutter who deems himself and his patrons more entitled to a vaccine than other Canadians. This simply is not the case. I will reiterate that he was only accepting appointments from people born between 1956 and 1981. In other words, staff and club members who are already eligible to receive the vaccine under British Columbia’s provincial rollout plan. Maybe if the provincial vaccine rollout wasn’t so dogshit, he wouldn’t have felt the need to take this upon himself. Unfortunately, many people are having trouble booking their appointments and the rollout has been slow from the get-go. If our slogan is ‘needles in arms’ and the most vulnerable populations have already been inoculated, why is our government preventing eligible citizens from receiving a dose of the least-sought-after vaccine? Keep in mind that the politicians barring Hollyburn members from receiving their vaccines have already received doses of their own. If anyone is jumping the line and acting in an elitist, exclusive and appalling way here, it's those who inhabit our government.

There are a few rebuttals to this. I am aware of the specific supervision and data-collection protocols which must be followed at all provincial vaccination clinics. This problem could have been easily remedied by sending one nurse and one data entry clerk to Hollyburn to observe and report on Hollyburn’s progress. Indigo was only in possession of a few hundred doses and most vaccine clinics are providing upwards of 1,000 vaccines per day, so it’s not as if they would have needed to divert significant resources to make this accommodation. It should also be recognized that the doses were being sent from a New Westminster pharmacy, located in the Fraser Health district, to West Vancouver, which is governed by Vancouver Coastal Health. While this shipment between health authorities was perhaps an oversight, I would ask anyone who is dying on that particular hill to riddle me, pardon my French, who the fuck cares?!? We’re in the middle of an emergency, a fact which seems to have escaped our politicians. I don’t really give a hoot where the doses are coming from. If someone is stepping up and helping to get a few hundred more ‘needles in arms’, they should receive a commendation, not a petition calling for them to be fired.

The decision to scuttle this clinic should be added to the long list of murky, hypocritical and seemingly senseless exercises of authority that our government has treated us to over the past year. While it may be hyperbolic and melodramatic to announce Canada as a socialist state, I think us citizens should take a good, hard look at how our country has handled this pandemic. A Chinese citizen came out not too long ago and announced that the vaccines being produced by his country were of sub-par quality. He has since been disappeared by his own government. Ed McLaughlin, Hollyburn’s CEO, took it upon himself to get his community vaccinated, because the government has been taking its sweet time. His efforts were met with a bureaucratic brick wall and it is likely that he will be silenced and stripped of his position. While this may not be the most apt comparison (the former obviously being much more severe than the latter), my intention was to illustrate the opaque and seemingly arbitrary applications of governmental power that Canada has been dealing with throughout the pandemic. While you may say "boo hoo!" to a handful of elites being denied the opportunity to receive a vaccine in their own private club, the focus should be on the hypocrisy of already-vaccinated politicians disincentivizing individual action in this difficult situation. It would have been much easier for them to simply accommodate the clinic. Instead, they chose to put these go-getters in their place, and drive their leader out of his office.