Read on Twitter
Me: "I& #39;ve had my first vaccine. So have my husband and parents, and the general public is going *fast.* Britain a bit ahead of us has zero deaths and a huge plunge in new cases. Maybe we can feel a tiny bit of hope?"
Public health officials: "No you cannot. Stay the dour course."
Public health officials: "No you cannot. Stay the dour course."
It is astonishing how often parenting little kids has echoes in adult life. For instance, it is useful to tell them there is something good for dessert after they eat dinner. You know, instead of telling them that all they get after they eat dinner is a kick in the shins.
I get that the comms around this is a delicate dance with ~40 per cent of Canadians having a first dose only. You don& #39;t want to give people an inch, then they take a mile and set the whole thing back.
But giving them NOTHING to hope for and no knowledge to conduct themselves by is terrible for a bunch of reasons. One, if you give them no info or guidelines for partially-vaccinated or post-vaccinated life, they& #39;ll just do whatever and it might not be great.
Sure, the logic that gun laws are for law-abiding gun owners and they& #39;re not the problem applies here to some extent. But people who are not following the rules are going to do that anyway. Give some useful guidance to the many who want it!
Two, we all KNOW damn well that the vaccines change everything—or will, gradually—or why have we seized on this miracle? So shaking your finger at us and telling us they change nothing is infantilizing, patronizing and torches trust.
Three— a bigger problem when pent-up demand for vaccines from the willing and eager is satiated—some people need motivation to get vaccinated. "Your life and the lives of everyone else will be exactly as miserable as they are at present on the far side of this" is...not helpful.
And four: for the love of god, give people some hope, something to reach for, some reason to keep slogging through the sewer right now. Even the most basic understanding of human nature should make this obvious.
Obviously at the point Canada is at, some hope and restoring things lost is not a message for *right this second.* But neither is it a message for six months from now, or the 10th of Never, which is what all the public health messaging indicates.
