Mandryk: Vaccination still best way to end pandemic
By Murray Mandryk
There is less of a fight over the desire to remove all restrictions than Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe and others would have us believe.
Surely, getting back to the way things were before the COVID-19 pandemic began almost two years ago is what everyone wants. Why wouldn’t it be?
We’re all sick and tired of having our lives disrupted.
The real question, however, remains: How do we keep people safe?
It still comes down to getting vaccinated.
Vaccines were the marker Moe relied on when his Saskatchewan Party government made the decision on July 11th to remove all restrictions by virtue of 70 percent of the adult population 18 years and over having received at least one dose.
Yes, that 70 percent was an arbitrary number at a time when children under 18 were not yet eligible. And it didn’t take into account that we always needed two shots to best prevent serious illness.
Yet we accepted it because we recognized that vaccination rates were the best marker available when it came to determining how safe we were.
As critical as hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths have been as measures of the battle against COVID-19, you don’t want to use these as a marker for the obvious reason: You want to avoid milestones like ICUs and deaths — not use them as markers.
Moreover, using vaccination rates as the marker was a great way to encourage more people to get vaccinated, which we all agreed was the best way out of the pandemic.
It all made more sense, so why wouldn’t we do something that just made sense.
It’s important to understand our vaccination rates - and perhaps why Moe and his government have suddenly decided they are supposedly no longer significant in government decision-making of removing restrictions.
Where we all can surely agree with the Saskatchewan Premier is that it’s been exceedingly difficult to get a small portion of adamant vaccine resisters to agree to finally get vaccinated.
While about 80 per cent of this province’s total population are vaccinated (when you take into account little children under five years still not eligible) that remains among the lowest rates in the country along with Alberta and the territories.
And convincing the unvaccinated has surely become harder instead of easier.
By the end of January, Saskatchewan only recorded 20,765 receiving their first dose, bringing the total number of people in the province with at least one dose to 963,399 people.
This is the worst monthly total in quite some time compared with 38,799 first doses doled in December, 32,272 in November, 48,047 in October and 41,948 in September.
Of those 20,765 Saskatchewan first dose recipients, 10,944 were recently eligible children five to 11 years old, and another 2,190 were children between 12 and 17.
When it comes to adults, January saw only about saw an average of 246 first doses a day — a fraction of the 1,000 or so a day average in November and December.
The problem is that what Moe is now saying and what his government is doing is becoming their own self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s surely worth noting that the surge in new vaccine recipients we saw in September and October came after the government implemented vaccine passports.
Now Moe is saying that he doubts he can get many more vaccinated, that Omicron is responsible for Omicron, that vaccines don’t aren’t stopping the spread of Omicron and that the vast majority of people just want things re-opened.
Moe’s notion that vaccines don’t stop Omicron spread has outraged doctors. Others question whether this is more about the Premier looking for justifications to avoid doing what he admits is very hard.
Yes, it’s hard to get people the remaining people vaccinated. But vaccines have been and still are the way out of this pandemic.