One step forward, another step back — Canada's pandemic response in a nutshell
On the good news we got last week, but why that's a sign of planning on the fly.
I'm ripping myself off a bit here, cribbing liberally from a column already published at TVO.org, but there is a real danger in my line of work that your stories go obsolete or stale before they can be published. A column or news report has to go through a few steps before it gets from the writer to the audience and each of those steps is important in their own way, but they all impose costs in energy and money and, to my point here, time. At Code 47, this is obviously not as true — I don't have any editor here, and I proofread and publish everything myself. (Which is why typos slip through — I'm a notoriously lousy copy editor and I've given myself permission not to sweat it.) I can get stuff online here about as fast as I can write it, slap it into the Substack and click publish.
A week ago today, that still wasn't fast enough.
“Elder Canadians are being vaccinated in all provinces, and younger Canadians will be up soon," I wrote here on Friday. "I can't help but break this down into what it'll mean for my family, and I'm optimistic — I'd almost forgotten what that felt like! — that my in-laws will be safely vaccinated by next month and my parents, God willing, by the summer."
It was about 90 minutes after that went online that my dad texted me to report that he, my mother and my aunt had all booked their vaccination appointments at a local Shoppers Drug Mart. They got their jabs and are now patiently waiting while their bodies build up immunity. That’ll take about four weeks, after which, they will be largely protected from COVID-19’s most serious outcomes. Their lives will be back to something much, much more normal. Not all the way normal, but getting there.
My folks and my aunt are in their early to mid 60s. Their vaccinations are a quirk of Ontario's policy choices. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are approved for all adults in Canada; but AstraZeneca was initially only approved for adults under the age of 65. This wasn't because there was any particular concern for the over-65s, but because the data results for that age group were slower in coming and are still being reviewed. Different Canadian provinces handled this in their own way. Quebec decided just to use it for all adult age groups. Ontario, though, made a smart decision — they said, well, fine, if we can't use it for the over-65s, we'll use it for the 60-65s, who are just creeping into the high-risk age bracket.
At least I think it's a smart decision. I have to confess that I am obviously biased. Of course I like the decision that got my parents and aunt vaccinated sooner than expected. I think that my support for the policy would remain even if they hadn't personally benefitted, but who really knows. The policy choice did certainly result in some absurdities — my father, a healthy man in his 60s, ended up getting vaccinated the day before his mother, a woman in her mid-90s with a pre-existing pulmonary condition. My in-laws are about a decade older than my parents, and are therefore at greater risk from COVID-19, but are still waiting for their appointments, which isn't ideal. No one would plan it this way, but real life never aligns precisely with the expectation. Indeed, the whole thing brought to mind the words of then-U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Referring back to his experience as the Supreme Allied Commander during the Second World War, Ike famously commented that "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."
Some blink and look at me funny when I say that. Others nod in immediate understanding of what Ike was saying. This is an example of that. Ontario's plan has been rightly criticized. There is a lot about it that could have been done better, and I'm not at all convinced it's going as well as it should even now. But when presented with a sudden influx of newly approved AstraZeneca doses, doses the Ontario government had not accounted for when it had just updated its plan, they adapted, on the fly, and found a way to get the fast-expiring shots into arms. It probably wasn't the perfect way, but it was fast and it will make a difference. I'll take the win.
The whole pandemic has been, in a lot of ways, a real-time case study of logistics under pressure. At the outset, there were shortages of critical supplies, like PPE, and then shortages of almost everything (except gas, weirdly). You couldn't buy bread or flour for weeks or months, and soup was wiped out for a long time, as were aluminum cans for any number of products. (Craft brewers across North America felt that pain sharply — they couldn’t can their product!) Now it's all about chemicals and agents most of us have never heard of, but all of which are essential to make vaccines, plus the bottles to store the vaccine in, and the syringes to do the injections. (Indeed, one act of genuine foresight early in the pandemic was the Canadian federal government's order of tens of millions of syringes — a rare moment of proactive action, as opposed to the panicky reaction we've been mostly presented with.)
Logistics isn't just about making stuff, though, and that's an important point. It's also about transporting the stuff you've made, keeping track of where it is through real-time inventory management, and getting it into the hands of properly trained and equipped professionals so it can be used, when and where needed, before it expires.
Making rapid use of the AstraZeneca vaccines Ontario had was a success story. The reportedly chaotic launch of the province's vaccination appointment booking system — rushed into service despite months of warning with staff who'd only gotten a few hours of training — is a story of failure. It's one-step backward and one-step forward microcosm of our entire pandemic response.
But hey. My parents and aunt got vaccinated. I'll take it.
I was busy this week. Too busy! But I got a lot done.
There were the usual videos at the National Post, including this one, where I wondered what the hell we were thinking partnering with China on the first phase of our vaccination campaign.
And this one, on Trudeau's gun control plans taking fire — ahem — from both left and right. (I let my mask slip for a second at 2:09 in that video, which you might enjoy.)
China was a topic I returned to later in the week, when I wrote a Post column on China's decision to try the two Michaels. This is actually a favour for Trudeau, I wrote. He's now run out of excuses for inaction. "If you’re looking for a reason to cut Trudeau and his government a break on their feeble China policies, this is it: we daren’t do anything to rock the boat while they have the two Michaels," I wrote. "That die is sadly cast. If there’s any route to getting those men back home, it runs through Washington, not Ottawa. The time has come for Canada to actually stand up for what it claims to believe in and take what modest steps it can against China." Check that column out here.
Also in the Post, I wrote a column covering the Kielburger's testimony for the House ethics committee on Monday. I cannot imagine any of you actually want to even think about that embarrassing spectacle again, let alone read a column recapping it, but if you really hate yourselves that much, I mean, sure. Click this link and suffer.
Over at TVO.org, I was busy. On Monday, as noted above, I recapped my parents' (and aunt's!) successful vaccination, and said we'd better get busy planning a return to normal. "It is too soon to reopen Ontario fully," I wrote. "There is still a real danger of a third wave. But a gradual reopening, leading to a full one once it’s safe, is closer than many might realize, especially on the scale of government planning. This is going to happen. It’s going to happen soon. And after a long year of stumbling from one crisis to another, always reacting on the fly, it would be nice to at least get to work planning for the fun, cheerful part." Check that out here.
And this one, honestly, folks. I don't know if I can really describe this one in a way that'll do it justice. I had a chance to once again interview the University of Toronto Scarborough's Steve Joordens, and he never disappoints. Check out the interview. Just click the link. You won't regret it.
And, well, yeah. Ryan is right.
OK, folks, that's it for this week. Have a wonderful weekend.
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