Here’s an admission I hate to make: Increasingly, I hate media. Not talking about my well-known hate of social media. No. I mean bona fide, real journalists, “serious” media. The kind I generally trust to get the facts and report the facts and, most importantly, draw the necessary conclusions.
High on my list of media I’m growing to hate is our own CBC. The taxpayer-funded, 500-pound gorilla more often than not resembles tabloid journalism, grasping for the Outrage-of-the-Day story and glossing over—or in many cases simply not asking—the hard questions, in favour of needling into something designed to bring a tear to the subject’s and viewer’s eye.
Most recently, their reporting on the Liberal government’s decision to open the borders to U.S. visitors who had been fully vaccinated failed to address, or even ask, the most pertinent question: How will people prove they’ve been fully vaccinated? Over repeated cycles of this story—I was trapped in a road trip—I kept wondering when they were going to address this glaring hole in the happy story. Never happened and still today I have no real idea what’s going to be required of people presenting themselves at the border and whether it’ll be meaningless.
I fear it’ll be a lot like the grilling people got from BC Ferry ticket sellers when trips across the water were supposed to be limited to “necessary” travel. That screening largely consisted of the employee asking, “Is this trip necessary?” frequently posed as, “This trip is necessary, isn’t it?”
The news story of the past week getting lots of play and presenting the absolutely wrong conclusion came out of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Provincetown sits at the tip of Cape Cod. It is a tourist town. A coastal mecca with white sand beaches facing the Atlantic ocean, Provincetown has a couple of thousand year-round residents. In the case of Provincetown, year-round may well be a misnomer. I once met a hot dog vendor of the cart variety who, supercharged by a party-hearty, hungry swarm of tourists frequently topping 50,000 daily, sold enough hot dogs during the summer months to live job-free in Florida during the town’s nasty winters.
While there are parallels to, say, Tiny Town, Provincetown doesn’t have a housing crisis, unless you consider vacant homes a crisis. This is because the town is a one-trick pony—summer tourism. Strolling down Commercial Street in the days leading up to Labour Day, the town was crammed with end-of-summer tourists. Shops did a booming business, restaurants were full, the nightlife booming and boisterous. There is a good reason the locals call the onslaught of tourists during the summer the Circus, as in, “The Circus is in town.”
But eerily, the Tuesday after Labour Day, the town suddenly looks like a set for a post zombie apocalypse film. No tourists, closed shops, boarded windows and in the few places open, workers are busy getting ready to close for the winter.
The news coming out of Provincetown in the past week was, not surprisingly, about COVID-19. The town’s locals boasted a vaccination rate in excess of 90 per cent—about 75 per cent double vaccinated—and considered the virus had been kicked to the curb. Until it wasn’t. Until vaccinated locals began to log new cases a few days after the July 4th invasion and then watched in horror as those cases increased rapidly.
As reported in the New York Times, out of 965 cases traced to the town, 238 were among residents ... vaccinated residents. Breakthrough cases. The silver lining was most of the vaccinated locals didn’t get seriously ill, none died, only seven were admitted to hospital.
So the moral of the story is vaccines work. Right? Wrong. The news that spread faster than the Delta variant was that even vaccinated people could get COVID-19. Oh dear. That quickly became ammunition for those who refuse to get vaccinated. What good is it if you can still get sick? Duh.
Health officials quickly began to try and put the genie back in the bottle, or in this case, correct the false narrative of the news stories. They pointed out this was actually proof vaccines work, at least to the extent people who had taken them weren’t terribly affected by the virus.
But the real story, the story that has meaning for a place like Whistler, is this: As long as we continue to have a significant minority of people who refuse to get vaccinated, we run the risk of killing the golden goose.
Last winter, Whistler was sacrificed on the alter of tourism and the bullheaded refusal of Saint Bonnie and Dithers Horgan to close the place to Lower Mainlanders, Albertans, Ontarians and whomever all those tourists were who spoke with funny accents. Notwithstanding the extreme measures taken by businesses in town, Whistler became Canada’s Italy, the country’s hotspot for COVID-19 infections. Overcrowded living arrangements were touted as the main contributing factor but the principle factor was tourists bringing the hot new variant du jour—Brazil—to town.
And so, we were closed down, conveniently after B.C.’s spring break.
What happened after that was a massive effort to get Whistler vaccinated. An effort that was hugely successful.
Now? Well, now we are Provincetown. Look around the village. Hardly anyone wearing masks. Including servers at most of the restaurants I passed by last time I ventured into the village. Why bother? We’re all vaccinated... mostly. We kicked it to the curb.
So every day, especially on weekends, Whistler is mobbed by tourists scratching their pandemic itch to go somewhere, anywhere, and pretend things are back to normal. Upwards of a third of them aren’t vaccinated. Fewer than the throngs in Provincetown but more than enough to spread the love around. So don’t be surprised when vaccinated locals start popping up at the clinic and discovering they’ve been infected.
That’s the story that wasn’t told.
With the border opening in less than a week to “vaccinated” U.S. visitors, it would take a particular kind of optimist to think we’re going to dodge this bullet.
Vaccines work. Full stop. André Picard, writing in Monday’s Globe and Mail, cited figures from Ontario that, “ ... tell this story eloquently. Between June 12 and July 21, the unvaccinated made up 95.7 per cent of new COVID-19 cases, 97.4 per cent of hospitalizations, 99.5 per cent of intensive care admissions, and 95.8 per cent of deaths.”
It’s time to stop pretending everyone has a “right” to refuse vaccination. If, indeed, they have that right, we have a paramount right to not be infected by them, which means keeping them cloistered in their pretend world of conspiracy theories.
If not, I can imagine yet another foreshortened ski season, among other ongoing horrors.
