A compelling critique of Ontario's vaccine mandates

National Post, 16 October 2021

The province’s circumstances 'do not justify the coercive and disruptive policies' that have been implemented, Cardus think-tank tells Premier Ford.

Vaccine mandates and associated “passports” can be justified only as effective prophylaxis in a genuine public health emergency, but not as a punitive policy intended to coerce compliance. In that position I have the official support of the premier of Canada’s largest province, Doug Ford, who has said repeatedly that vaccine mandates will not last “one day more than necessary.”

I take Ford to mean “necessary” in its usual meaning. His chief public health officer, Kieran Moore, seems to think it means something else, stating that the mandates — with the exclusion of the unvaccinated from increasing swaths of common life, including employment — could last well into 2022.

There are now some Ontario hospitals that have announced a ban on unvaccinated visitors. Not hospitals with overflowing ICUs, with other patients stacked up in the corridors. Hospitals that have few, if any, COVID patients at all. Hospitals that have on site the capacity for rapid testing. Nonetheless, patients in hospital, including the gravely ill, will be banned from having unvaccinated visitors, even if the patient is vaccinated and the visitor could easily be tested upon arrival.

Pandemic policy is a matter of balance. In Ontario, that balance has been elusive. Schools were closed for months on end, with all the attendant negative consequences for students, in health regions where there were fewer active cases than children in a typical classroom. Measures introduced to deal with rising case counts at a certain level were continued even under falling case counts at half or a quarter of that level.

Now my colleagues at Cardus, in the form of an open letter to Premier Ford , have provided a detailed analysis of the vaccine passport policy, with concrete proposals for alternatives that are effective, practical and not punitive. “We’ve Got Better Options” is not government-hating, conspiracy-spotting, anti-scientific raving. It is sober analysis.

The letter’s message to the premier is blunt: “Ontario is not in an emergency, and this province’s circumstances do not justify the coercive and disruptive vaccine policies that your government has imposed.”

Read the open letter. Disagree it with its policy alternatives to mandates and passports if you like. But pay attention to the data. Much of what you think you know, or have been told, you don’t actually know.

Ontario’s pandemic policy has been largely driven by predictions by the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table. It sketches out various scenarios, including a harrowing worst-case one, and then the government responds.

This is how it works. Ford rejected the idea of vaccine passports in July. When he reversed himself six weeks later, the situation had not deteriorated. What happened? Enter the Science Table.

“Despite a vague but alarming forecast by the Ontario COVID Science Advisory Table — released the same day as your passport announcement — the ‘fourth wave’ has been underwhelming,” Cardus writes to Ford. “Even with the reopening of schools in September, daily cases have not reached 1,000, while ICU occupancy has not risen even to the Science Table’s best-case projection.”

As for Ford’s reversal, Cardus writes: “ICU occupancy [due to Covid] is actually lower than it was at the time of your ‘hard no’ to passports, at 17 per cent of the third-wave peak. COVID-involved patients occupy less than one per cent of Ontario’s 33,000 hospital beds. The Table’s updated forecast (Sept. 28) describes a much less grim scenario than the previous model — and is already too pessimistic, as ICU occupancy is again below the stated best-case scenario.”

Why are Ontario hospitals not filling up as the Science Table thought possible?

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