Unvaccinated or Scapegoats

There are no simple solutions for complex problems. The bad news is that Covid-19 is here to stay. There have been a few variants in the last two years which assure us there will be many more coming in the future as well. There is no long term effective vaccine or treatment available worldwide. Therefore virus will easily infect people in all countries.

In the last two years, we developed a few tools such as various tests, vaccines and treatments to control the spread of virus and reduce the symptoms and mortality. However, these tools are neither decisively effective nor worldwide available to eliminate the virus. Consequently, in my opinion, pandemic is over. We will have many more of virus waves to come.

Now, we should learn how to live with it. We know vaccines work and reduce the number of hospitalizations, however the effectiveness of the vaccine seems quite short and works only a few months after injections (mysteriously no data is available how long vaccines are effective). Rapid tests are also available to diagnose the infected people and isolate them. Finally, there are a few treatments in the final stage of development to reduce the disease symptoms.

Another positive note, the number of hospitalization and mortality of regular flu reduced three folds in the last two years while we used all the precautionary measures to protect ourselves from airborne respiratory diseases.

The number of vaccinated people in Quebec is 90% which makes us one of the top vaccinated population in the world. Realistically, there will be no population with 100% vaccinated people. It is quite normal to have a minority of the population being resistant to the new norm. As a matter of fact, if we (the majority) use the available tools wisely, this minority can be also protected and live in the society safely.

We do not ( and should not) intend to punish people for making the wrong choices in their lives being smokers, heavy drinkers, drug abusers, anti-vaxxer and so on. We have learnt that it is quite normal to have a minority being heavy to the society.

In my opinion, Quebec government should have done a much better job dealing with Covid-19 in the last two years. They have never learnt from their mistakes. Their responses to the virus surges are reactive rather than proactive.

By beginning of the cold season, Quebec government were not ready to deal with another wave of COVID and blame their shortcomings on 10% of unvaccinated people and tend to punish them with unjustified tax / tickets ( or worse access to treatments).

This is wrong. We can not use a minority of the society as the scapegoats. There are so many things go wrong which has nothing to do with the unvaccinated people.

We can not (and should not) blame unvaccinated people for the shortage of Rapid tests and vaccines; decisive plans to keep the society open; NOT being transparent about the vaccine effectiveness; and using scare tactics and acting like “know it all” while being in the learning curves.

We do not know everything about this virus and we should be humble about it. However, we should NOT make a mistake twice.

Reza Parsa Nejad,

Montreal

January 12, 2022