Nobody Cares About COVID19 Vaccine Details

By: Laura Steiner

The average Canadian doesn’t care about the details of Canada’s vaccine rollout.  You can explain that Pfizer didn’t send shipments because it had to modify its plant in Belgium in order to ramp up production until you’re blue in the face.  Nobody cares, and whose fault that is, is a debate for another day.

They care about what they see on their newscasts. A steady stream of images and video of people getting their vaccines in other countries.  And an equal amount of time spent looking at why they don’t have it.  Taking all of this into account it’s only natural to ask the questions of why, and when.  Why are they slow to ship them to Canada, and when will they ship them?

You can get into the questions about why Canada didn’t fix its own production issues before this.  The answer involves Brian Mulroney, Connaught Labs.  Or a building in Montreal that didn’t come up to industry standards before it was supposed to open in in November.  But… nobody cares.

Because what people see are the empty places at the dinner table where their parents sat.  Or a chair in the living room where a favourite uncle dangled their niece.  They’ll have to go claim a loved one’s belongings at a long-term care home. They’ll hear a  final phone call from a loved one before they were put on a ventilator.  They’ll be tortured by the question of whether their missing loved ones would’ve been safe, if only the vaccine was administered sooner.

They’ll see an increasingly foolish-looking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cling to the hope that everyone will be vaccinated by September.   And they won’t hear the excuses, or detailed explanations that he tells us. Because they don’t match reality.