RANT: TRUCKERS: FROM HEROES TO ZEROES? SO SOON?

I WILL ADMIT TO BEING constitutionally anti-social and basically a hermit these days, and often clueless about the world going on around me, but IIRC weren’t we calling front-line health-care workers, support staff, educators, and grocery and pharmacy staff, convenience-store clerks, etc. heroes at the beginning of this pandemic thingy? Including truck drivers who kept bringing us all our stuff? You know, all those racist, white nationalists and “Kremlin-controlled” “January Sixers”, and whatever and what-all they’re supposed to be now?

RECENT PROTESTS HAVE BEGUN BY CANADIAN truckers who are upset with government-mandated restrictions forcing them to self-isolate¹ for 2 weeks upon returning from trips to the US, if they are “unvaxxed”. Almost ninety percent of Can Truck drivers are vaccinated, but according to Reuters, from “12,000-22,000 may be sidelined” because of the Jan. 15, 2022, federal vaccine mandates. 

 

I THINK THESE FOLKS have legitimate reasons for being ticked-off. Is the work they do now deemed to be less  essential to Canadians and the economy than it was a year ago? Guess I’ll have to stick with iceberg lettuce for my salad fixings if California’s Romaine is off the table. And I don’t think “autonomous, self-driving” vehicles are up-to-snuff and able to take over, just yet, from all those germy humans behind the wheel. I note that several countries (Denmark, Ireland, Sweden) are relaxing their pandemic restrictions and vaccine “passport” mandates. So, it remains to be seen whether our governments, federal and provincial, here in Canada, will consider that it may be time to loosen things up. There are a lot of people, myself included, who are increasingly skeptical about the vaccine passport regimes under which we are currently obliged to submit. Just how long do they intend to run the thing? And how can we be assured  that information embedded in those eye-aching QR ("Quick Response") codes will be secure from prying eyes? (Answer: We can't be sure.)

How effective have broad, population-wide inoculation programs been in curbing what seems to be something that will remain endemic and part of our disease matrix going forward, like the flu and other corona viruses? Would it not be better to have more targeted lock-down and treatment regimes, like those that were done with the SARS outbreak in 2003-4—to assist the elderly and persons with co-morbidities? We recall that China, and in particular Wuhan Province, where the outbreak apparently started, had a very quick, hard lock-down. It seemed they threw everything except the kitchen sink at it for a couple of months and, according to recent statistics, has had under 5,000 deaths! In a country of 1.4 billion, that's impressive, to say the least. Maybe quick, hard measures were the way to go, with contact tracing, testing, treatments and eventually some sort of vaccine as an additional measure. I don't know what the most efficacious actions should be in these situations. We will undoubtedly have  more answers on how to better handle disease outbreaks like Covid-19 in the future, based on our experiences during these last couple of years. 

BUT HOW LONG will we be required to carry around our vaccine “passports”, digital or paper, to move within the public spaces of our nation? Will digital passports become a permanent fixture in our lives, something I've talked about in an earlier post? It's already becoming a disagreeable (from my perspective) fact of life in China, known as the "Social Credit Score" system, though it's not, as yet, fully operational.

FINALLY, WILL TRUCK DRIVERS (AND OTHER FOLKS) who have legitimate questions around putting into their bodies what seem, to me at least, to be relatively untried and experimental serums? Will they be forced to get jabs in order to make a living? The pharmaceutical companies did rush their product to market. Didn’t they? We were told that, once vaccinated, we would not contract or transmit the virus. That’s simply not the case. I’m not saying these vaccines haven’t helped with the severity of symptoms of the disease or acted to slow it down, but they’re far from the panacea we were promised at the start of this thing. People have the right to say NO, after all, and we need to balance people’s right to bodily-autonomy with public safety. Demonizing truck-drivers as a loonie-fringe group is an “Off-Side Foul” in my book. This isn’t 1918, and it’s not ”Spanish Flu.” Protect the vulnerable, treat the sick, and let the healthy get on with their lives. There! I’ve said it! I feel so much better!

 

Cheers, Jake.    

(For the record, I am double-vaxxed and booster-ized, and have gotten my annual flu jab.)

_____________________________

 

 

* We’re not as progressive as Australia, with its "Fun-in-the-Sun" Covid Camps.   

 

^1. Watch a humorous interview made by a news announcer the other day where she raises the ridiculous possibility of Russian influence vis-à-vis the trucker protests! See Here. The CBC talking head looks sheepish in the news-clip while interviewing the Minister of Public Safety. I’ll bet she was coached to bring up the possibility of Russian "collusion" in the trucker protests by one of her supervisors. How utterly asinine!