Canada imposes Covid-19 vaccine mandate on federal workers, transportation
reuters.com
reuters.com
Canadians are, for the most part, okay with these restrictions.
If you wanted to make a generalization about Canadians and our view of our politicians, it's that we can't stop cringing long enough to mobilize an effective movement to change them out. It's a national paralysis of cringe, and at this point it's probably by design.
> If you wanted to make a generalization
You made a generalization. I'm okay with them.
To be fair, the far left peoples party was the only party who stood up for freedom. This gained them nearly a million more votes. The NDP picked up ~120,000 more votes compared to last election, but otherwise all other parties lost votes. Liberals and Cons lost about half million votes each.
Yes, the people party gains were heavy in the hippie anti-vaxxer far-left stoner category, but there's nothing wrong with that. The problem was their stance on defunding the media. It made the media the enemy and the media smeared them with massive lies calling them nazis, white supremacists, and far right. Which is absolutely false but here we are.
A mandate also means the people subject to it are not giving their consent, sort of like how you "consent" to an invasive search in an airport, which violates privacy laws for health information in most provinces. The policy is contemptible, and even though I can't think of a better cohort for forced medical procedures than the architects of this appalling attack on freedom who work in the permanent state, I would still defend their individual liberty and bodily integrity as much as the next Canadian.
Further, you get nothing back for complying. You still wear masks, you still show a vaccine passport to eat indoors, (with slots for 10 or more boosters in some cases), the government still destroys small businesses and forfeits its accountability to "committees" of scientists, who are mostly social scientists, as though letting scientists decide policy was legitimate at all. So called emergency powers that enable random stop and question powers for vague deputized and untrained people remain on the books "just in case."
I understand your passport shows the date of your shot that you have to share with whoever demands it, so once you have hesitated, does it really matter how long, comrade?
Authoritarianism isn't science. Submission is not a civic duty. I've been predicting this stuff since the beginning and haven't been wrong yet. However, this country is so divided I'm not even angry, as that would be frustration from the assumption these people can be reasoned with. The only thing you can do is hold them to the law.
Contributing to the well-being of your friends, family and fellow citizens ain't nothing.
But we can't all be brave.
The way these people talk, I wonder if they also have issues with "complying" with: having to insure their vehicle, wearing a seatbelt, not farting in a crowded elevator, sneezing into their sleeve, wearing clothes in public...
How is it against the Charter†? Airlines, to take one example, are federally regulated: so if there's a new regulation that says to fly you have to have been vaccinated, how is that stepping on provincial jurisdiction?
A list of federally-regulated industries:
* https://www.canada.ca/en/services/jobs/workplace/federally-r...
† Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for non-Canadians.
> Further, you get nothing back for complying.
How about reducing the probability of using up an ICU bed by a substantial margin? In many places (in CA and US), out of 100 ICU beds often >95 are taken up by the non-vaccinated. In some places 100% of new admissions are the unvaccinated:
* https://www.660citynews.com/2021/09/23/alberta-covid-icu-adm...
* https://globalnews.ca/news/8215655/alberta-coronavirus-updat...
Yes, you can still get COVID after vaccination, but not dying seems to me to be not "nothing".
And it's not like other illness have stopped: the unvaccinated are using beds that could also be needed for people who've had (e..g) heart attacks.
While we're not going to litigate the charter federally in an HN thread, the separate provincial privacy laws about health information and consent apply to patients as individuals, and just because you're flying between them doesn't remove your rights. They are different from the charter issue, but there are still avenues for challenge.
Even taking the data at face value, blaming "the unavaccinated," as an outgroup has nothing to do with passports, and everything to do with a petty, cowed, and propagandized population, whose apprehension of ethics and morality is on the level of a superstitious mob watching professional wrestling.
These are what makes the issue irreconcilable, and why all that is left is the law.
Some (atlantic)judges have already ruled on how the charter reacts to health pandemics. Not-withstanding clause is not needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Oakes
If Canadians had a problem with this. They wouldn't have voted Liberal, Con, or NDP. The Peoples party provided an alternative option and they didnt gain a single seat.
Pilots and aircrew are not federal employees, do they need to be vaccinated? (I know the answer, but it's addressed poorly by this policy.
There was talk about very strict medical exemptions, which is great as it is otherwise a path ripe for abuse, but I'm hearing that religious exemptions are still being considered.
The unions I've heard about are encouraging religious exemptions and a "take your word for it" proof policy, where your supervisor can ask for evidence but is not required to.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Canada has a few industries that are 'federally regulated' (e.g. overtime rules, etc.) and transportation is one of them.
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/jobs/workplace/federally-r...
Results in some funny situations like truckers not getting provincial holidays. And some holidays are federal only (so you get it if you're a federal employee or in one of those few federally regulated industries).
It gets even weirder with essential workers, which pilots are.
And then they're heavily unionized. Unions are more likely to follow letter of the law than the intent.
And then honestly - I know a number of people who have had Covid after being vaccinated and it still sucks. If I can reduce the chances that my kids come home and get me sick, I’m on it in a second, assuming it’s safe (and it is).
the mortality in kids seems to be orders of magnitude smaller than the seasonal flu:
> as of May 2021, data from 79 countries accounting for 2.7 million COVID-19 deaths (69% of all documented global COVID-19 deaths) show that over 8700 (0.3%) of these deaths are in children and adolescents under 20 years of age (40% in children 0–9 years old and 60% in adolescents 10–19 years old). For illustrative comparative purposes, estimated annual fatalities for seasonal influenza preceding the COVID-19 pandemic included 9243 to 105,690 deaths of children younger than 5 years
Which there isn't really anything published for young children yet, but for age groups where use of a vaccine has been approved in the US (12+ more or less), the risk of severe side effects from vaccination is lower than the risk of severe illness.
For something easily preventable once the vaccine is available.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Around the same as atypical flu season.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127698/influenza-us-dea...
Some risks in life you have to accept, but ones that are trivially avoidable?
Shutting down schools to prevent children from getting COVID has too many side effects given the risk level, but the vaccine has such a low cost and so few side effects.
Actually, don't tell me. Save your breath -- you never know when you might need it.
How come stuff always gets reduced to categorical descriptions?
Like "prevent" is a pretty high bar, but things are still a lot better if you cut transmission by 50%.
Personal opinion the semi hysterical hand wringing over the imminent vaccination of children is because the anti-vaxers know that's the last shoe to drop.
I have elderly parents, due for their booster. And I care about my community.
That's because Korea had relatively slow roll out of vaccination + large national holiday (Chusuk). Given that Delta needs full vaccination to meaningfully slow down the spread, this is expected. The last week's R was less than 0.9, which coincides with recent vaccination program focused on the second shot while the mobility number is steadily increasing! There's a certain threshold where vaccine shows meaningful impacts on a reproduction rate, so you cannot simply saying "# of case is rising, vaccine is useless".
> while Spain and Japan have very recently had very large spikes (Japan's was several times larger than their previous spikes).
Japan also had pretty slow roll out, it had ~40% of full vaccination at the point of the spike but the number rapidly dropped as full vaccination rate goes up rapidly. This actually proves my point of strong correlation between reproduction rate and full vaccination rate. I know Japan now somehow arbitrarily limits free testing but positive test rate also has dropped significantly.
Spain's the most recent spike was mostly due to their lack of lockdown option. It also had some level of vaccine hesitancy (which led to much lower fully vaccinated than partial vaccination rate) but the recent spike led many people to take their second shot. And they're now seeing a significant drop without declaring state of emergency.
All of those slowing downs are strongly correlated with full vaccination rate. Of course, vaccine's effectiveness wanes over time so some sort of booster will be needed to keep its effectiveness.
I never said that second part, I was responding directly to "are observing significant reduction of daily cases and deaths".
You can't be observing "significant reduction" while the numbers are going up.
Singapore recently dropped their zero COVID strategy so it's expected to see some rising numbers. Vaccine is not supposed to eliminate virus, but keep their reproduction under control so our health care system won't explode. Why do you think it's a counter example for vaccine's effectiveness?
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135121451/how-the-pox-epidemi...
IMO, the reason for the hesitancy is the heavy handedness with which it is being pushed, and the obvious lies of the CDC. When the CDC says that it can't be proven that anyone has died from the vaccine, and then there are multiple credible news reports of healthy, relatively young people dropping dead from it, it calls into question everything else they say. They don't want to admit these things because they don't want to alarm people, but IMO coming out and saying "it kills and injures some people, but the benefits outweigh the risks for many groups" would be the right approach. It's the lying that's the problem. Even reporting adverse events based on the total number of doses administered, and not on the number of people that have received doses, is specifically intended to mislead and cut the real statistics in half. It just all looks terrible, and people assume they are lying about everything when they lie or obfuscate obvious things.
> A total of 56,151,862 vaccine doses have been administered in Canada as of October 1, 2021. Adverse events (side effects) have been reported by 17,982 people. That’s about 3 people out of every 10,000 people vaccinated who have reported 1 or more adverse events.
> Of the 17,982 individual reports, 13,307 were considered non-serious (0.024% of all doses administered) and 4,675 were considered serious (0.008% of all doses administered).
> Most adverse events are mild and include soreness at the site of injection or a slight fever.
> Serious adverse events are rare, but do occur. They include anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction), which has been reported 307 times for all COVID-19 vaccines across Canada. That’s why you need to wait for a period of time after you receive a vaccination so that you can receive treatment in case of an allergic reaction.
And[2]:
> Up to and including October 1, 2021, a total of 195 reports with an outcome of death were reported following vaccination. Although these deaths occurred after being vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine, they are not necessarily related to the vaccine. Based on the medical case review using the WHO-UMC causality assessment categories, it has been determined that:
> 73 of these deaths are unlikely linked to a COVID-19 vaccine
> 75 deaths could not be assessed due to insufficient information > 41 deaths are still under investigation
> 6 deaths followed a diagnosis of TTS (refer to the TTS bullet above)
So serious side effects in 4,675/55e6 doses. That's something like a 0.01% incidence rate. And 195/55e6 deaths - 1 in 282,000.
If you don't want to trust any national health service I think we're at an impasse. Your problem is then fundamentally with the government (or even government as a concept) and not with the COVID vaccine.
[1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/su...
[2] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/#d...
FYI I am vaccinated. The statistics lean toward the benefits outweighing the risks for many groups of adults. I just wish these official agencies wouldn’t lie/mislead. They should lay out the actual facts and let people decide on their own. They undermine their own message and cause more of the very problem they are trying to solve.
Cutting it in half doesn't really undermine the conclusion that the vaccine is safe. I'm not really sure if the average person would go "1 adverse reaction in 282,000, that seems safe. But 1 adverse reaction in 141,000? That's too risky!" Arguably the "per dose" incident rate is also most useful for answering the question: "If I go get vaccinated today, what are the chances I'm going to have a very bad day?" Reporting per person would also obscure cases like a person getting both doses and having a serious adverse reaction both times and we might instead be arguing about how they're underreporting those cases.
I think this would be a more pertinent point if the adverse event rate was higher - e.g. 20% vs 10% is a much more significant difference from doubling. Basically, if they wanted to mislead they did a really poor job. To me this points to bad design or some kind of data collection related requirements/restrictions we're not aware of (perhaps it's a problem of correlating reports to a person if you also need to keep this data anonymous for privacy reasons - but I'm just speculating).
The point is that they are intentionally doing something to water down the stats. In the minds of the vaccine hesitant, it destroys their credibility on everything else they say, even when those other things are entirely factual. Just seems like a terrible strategy to me. They are giving their critics both the gun and the ammunition with which to shoot them.
We have never had to show a compliance document to eat in restaurants. Even the age of majority for alcohol was a single event, and not an ongoing compliance test. Equating transportation, restaurants, private employment, and cultural venues - to schools kids are forced into, is a false equivalence.
Get a vaccine, and whether someone else has or hasn't is not anyones business.
Exactly this. It either works or it doesn’t. If it does, we don’t need to worry about anyone else’s vaccine status. If it doesn’t, then people are taking an unnecessary risk by getting it.
I am against the mandates, and I am vaccinated. Whether or not to get it should be a very nuanced decision, based upon the specific adverse reaction and breakthrough infection statistics for a given person’s age and underlying health conditions vs the COVID statistics for the person. If the CDC had any desire to be honest, they would have an online calculator that would ask a few questions about BMI, age, etc., and then it would tell you the your specific odds of being killed/injured by the vaccine (with the odds of dying from COVID despite being vaccinated factored in) vs the odds of catching and then dying from COVID unvaccinated.
Instead, it has become a test of wills. Tests of wills have historically not played out well at a national level in “free” countries.
> Get a vaccine, and whether someone else has or hasn't is not anyones business.
If only that were true. Unfortunately I don't like lockdowns and new and exciting COVID "variants".
[1] https://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135121451/how-the-pox-epidemi...
Because it is. Vaccine mandates were already present every US state and, because Canada is our hat, probably there as well.
Good!
Medical, yes. Religious and philosophical? Broadly, no[1].
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/publications/topic/vaccinations.htm...
Is there a difference? I ask this as an ardant Hindu who practices lots of woo woo
International flights are still a free-for-all.
~100 years after arbitrary requirements are imposed on international travel, people freak out about one that is a direct response to exigent circumstances and not likely to be permanent.
I guess you are probably free to walk into an ocean regardless of vaccination status, I'm not sure what other situation post implementation of the international passport system would reasonably be described by a 'right to exit'.
The point is if another destination would have you, it is a violation of your right to be unable to freely exit. If hypothetically Canada did not allow you to board a non-chartered plane to emigrate I would argue this would be encroaching if not outright violating this right.
Sloppy metaphor?
Seriously: what am I supposed to glean here?
There is nothing oppressive about universal, free access to a safe vaccine. Seriously: have some perspective.
What will you do if the government mandates you to take a drug for similar justifications one day, but you actually honestly do not think it is safe for you? Do you think this precedent even if we assume good intentions is a good slope to be eagerly sliding down? What if we find drug interactions or other correlated variables that harm people who take it, or evidence comes along that affect your decision but the government disagrees? How much do you trust the authorities to navigate this, and how much are you willing to give up to them if you are one day on the non-consensus side?
I'm sorry, but you're not oppressed. You've decided not to take a free and effective vaccine, and society is going to make collective public health decisions whether you participate or not.
This is a bizarre (and uniquely contemporaneous and American) notion of "authoritarianism." We really are a country of new and strange ideas!
There are many people like me who do not like seeing what is going on and are fully vaccinated. We have read enough history and have seen the hatred forming towards people divided on political and cultural lines, as the state pushes the envelope of acceptable oppression as it always does. Authoritarianism only happens when enough people can form a “reasonable” argument justifying it, usually out of fear or hatred of others, not rationally. Given the lack of acceptance of natural immunity, rationality seems not a full explanation.
Just because you think getting vaccinated is a good idea doesn’t mean you can ignore oppression around you towards those who are trying to defend their right to body autonomy. Besides, what if you are next?
New York state, in its infinite wisdom, has electronic vaccine records. There's even a blockchain involved, for some reason.
I shared my vaccine records with my elementary school, middle school, high school, and college before attending each. If I had burned those records, they would have made me get vaccinated again. But that doesn't make me "oppressed," it makes me a fool who burned my vaccine records.
> Besides, what if you are next?
Oblique comparisons to the Holocaust are as ridiculous and offensive as direct ones.
Doubt.
I was required to get a DTaP vaccine in college (in another state, mind you) because I couldn't prove that I had gotten one as an adolescent. I had gotten one, but I'd lost the record.
It's not the government oppressing unvaccinated, it's us, the majority doing it, because we consider unvaccinated people irresponsible.
But oblio, I hear you say, that's mean, that's not fair, it's not democracy. Yes it is, that's why modern democracies have constitutions that protect basic rights and minority rights.
Basic rights apply for all but if unvaccinated basic rights (in this case the right to not be inconvenienced for a bit by vaccination) infringe majority basic rights (the right to life and long term wellbeing), frequently they don't apply.
Plus unvaccinated people are not a valid minority. They're not a protected minority anywhere in the world.
Thankfully being anti-science and antisocial is not a protected category anywhere in the world that I know of.
What makes unvaccinated people smarter than ALL the rest of us? Do they think that we're all collectively and individually dumber than them? Their arrogance is astounding. They all think they're Galileo when 99.9999% are Bozo the Clown, or worse, shortsighted and maliciously selfish people.
Don't let your fear or contempt for others land you in the category of people that have led the charge on setting up systems that are eventually turned on them once the next group gets their hands on the reins.
As far as being anti-science goes, the vaccine mandates which do not account for natural immunity or the date you got your vaccines are fundamentally anti-science.
This is gross, it's basically an end to the dicussion. One is an immutable characteristic (being Jewish), the other one is a choice.
Your comment either contains a huge fallacy, or more likely, considering your other comments, pushes an agenda.
> As far as being anti-science goes, the vaccine mandates which do not account for natural immunity or the date you got your vaccines are fundamentally anti-science. Either way, goodbye!
> As far as being anti-science goes, the vaccine mandates which do not account for natural immunity or the date you got your vaccines are fundamentally anti-science.
In Europe at least the green passport also includes:
* a recent test
* proof of having had Covid
But then again, I'm getting nowhere with this discussion and hopefully sane governments won't listen to people like you.
Nice work plugging your ears and declaring an end to the discussion, this is surely the way to go and a sign of intellectual maturity.
You know that one of the bloodiest wars in European history was fought between who chose to be Protestant and who chose to be Catholic, correct? At the time, people like yourself surely were making the argument the conflict would quickly end if only those foolish and evil Catholics would just understand their error, repent, and do the right thing and join the Reformation. Catholics were, of course, deeply harming society, since an offense on God like indulgences was an offense on all and risked destroying society. And, of course, if you were in Spain, the opposite argument was made regarding the rebellous Protestants undermining the much-needed authority of the Church. While the bodies stacked up.
The nature of tribalistic discrimination is not rooted in choice or not choice. It is rooted in the identification of tribes and the ability for such a tribe to be oppressed due to a power differential, often motivated by fear, stereotyping, blame, or distrust. Tribes of which it is often the case that immutable characteristics drive the labeling process for obvious reasons, but often due to choices or beliefs. Humans have murdered millions and millions of people in tribal conflicts that are entirely grounded in choices of religion, political alignment, or other beliefs or behaviors that allow easy segmentation and identification of who is in which group.
I realize you want to try to clamber up to some kind of moral high ground by boxing me into something I'm not - I'm used to this method being used by those defending the idea it is just that millions of people shouldn't be able to work or go to the grocery store if they are unvaccinated - but you're just making yourself look foolish by declaring an end to discussions because of your emotional reaction to what I am saying. The tribalization of the choice to take the vaccine or not, combined with the very direct rationalizability of the oppression of these people (as nicely demonstrated by your previous reply) is a danger zone and is one that people who understand human behavior and history should be very concerned about.
Unless we have a stroke of luck and the threat of the virus subsides (something which seems increasingly less likely), we we should expect is an increased ratcheting up of oppression of the unvaccinated, who will dig in as well. The result, as always, will ultimately be violence, once the unvaccinated cannot tolerate it any further. Many will never get the vaccine: by making it a form of civil disobedience now, not merely a healthcare choice, we have guaranteed it. So we should hope that we get lucky and the seeds of conflict dissipate by science quelling the threat of the virus sufficiently that bystanders can no longer stomach barring unvaccinated people from public life.
This is really a case of a vocal minority putting up a fight. And unfortunately for them, the nation is going to keep moving forward.
The vaccines are somewhat effective therapeutics whose population-level effects weaken quite a bit after 3-6 months.
Herd immunity of the (virtually no risk) under 60 group continues to be the only way out. I'm sorry that your "sacrifice" of masks, staying home, and getting the jab were not the heroic things you thought they were. But there weren't heroic at all. They meant nothing. This is all now very obvious from cross-sectional international data.
All through the last two months, case counts went up to 10, 11, 12 cases / 100k (high for us) for the unvaccinated. For the fully vaccinated they stayed under 2 / 100k.
Even clearer for hospitalization and ICU admission. In the middle of September, 4.7/100k hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated. For the fully vaccinated, 0.38/100k.
The issue isn't the ineffectiveness of the vaccines. It's the fact that there's still hundreds of thousands, millions, of people unvaccinated. And the virus ran like wildfire through them, despite the rest of us doing our part.
Herd immunity from natural exposure is dangerous and isn't going to happen. A year and a half on, only 4% of the population here has tested positive.
FWIW my parents in Alberta lost 4 friends/acquaintances to COVID just in the past month. Only 2 of them were over 65. All were unvaccinated, devoutly religious & conservative, and dogmatic about their antivax/anti-mask positions.
That's because a lot of people have had it, never felt too bad, and never got tested while the virus was actively replicating in their body. This has been proven in randomized serological tests in many jurisdictions now.
I can't say anything about places in the US where it spread like crazy through the population in the first wave. But I've seen no studies to back up what you're saying here in Canada. Also various cities have been doing testing of sewer water for the virus, and the values have matched, roughly (and in advance), what has been seen in testing rates.
What are you talking about? Have you even looked at the data? Vaccines are overwhelmingly effective at reducing infection rate, hospitalizations and deaths. The latter two are down drastically among highly-vaccinated populations. And infections are only up because restrictions have been lifted.
Being able to achieve lockdown-era infection and death rates without a lockdown is pretty fucking spectacular.
> were not the heroic things you thought they were.
I don't think they're heroic. I'll stay home forever. As long as it takes. Was it worth it? Completely. You're clearly not aware of Canada's early vaccine shortage. Lockdowns worked perfectly until we were able to get most people vaccinated. Now we're just chasing the long tail.
And you misspelled backward.
It's all relative, but I'm not looking in the wrong direction.