A quick question before you continue reading this entry. If you received a phone call this season, saying that you and your family are scheduled to receive your COVID-19 vaccine on Christmas morning, would you have drastically rescheduled your plans? Would you have cancelled opening presents with your family or Christmas Day breakfast perhaps in favour of lining up to get your shot? I know mine would.
This is all hypothetical of course. Here in Ontario vaccination centres are on a break. Because COVID-19 has to go home and isolate and see it’s family for the holidays. News is coming out that Ontario’s vaccination programs are on pause for the moment. They can’t find staff apparently to fill them due to holiday vacations.
Then there was this news on Christmas Eve:
Less than 10% of Ontario’s doses have been administered. This is unacceptable. While families are divided, and small businesses are hurting, to procrastinate on rolling out the solution to the problem is inexcusable. Doug Ford likes to point fingers and blame the federal government. However this failure falls squarely on his shoulders. We have the vaccine. It’s sitting on the shelf waiting to be administered. Yet due to the provinces inaction or incompetence, I honestly don’t know which one, there they sit.
This vaccine needs to get into the arms of front line workers, long term care home residents and immune compromised people now. Once that’s done the rest of us can line up patiently as good Canadians and get our vaccine. However, it requires a plan and an execution of that plan. I’m not surprised at this turn of events however. My family’s ordeal in trying to get simple flu shots for ourselves turned into a months long endeavour of shopping around to various pharmacies to see whom had them in stock and who could administer it.
We cannot dither on this and point blame instead of planning. If we want to get back to work and back to normal, we need this to be done fast. Otherwise, we’ll be still in lockdown in 2022.
Joel MacLeod.ca 