Alberta’s bizarre and dangerous experiment in vaccine rationing began yesterday with the appearance of a website where Albertans can register to be considered for COVID-19 immunization sometime in the fall if any vaccine is left. You might get vaccinated, or you might not.
By the way, most of you who manage to get an appointment to be immunized will have to pay for it. No one in Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) is saying yet how much you’ll have to pay. They dropped a hint last month it might be $110. Once again, maybe, maybe not. Could be less; could be more.
They’re also going to make you go through the same excessively bureaucratic process to get an influenza shot this fall, by the way, but no one will have to pay for that one … yet.
So you should go to BookVaccine.Alberta.ca now to register for Alberta’s answer to Lotto 6/49 for people who are, as American comedian Stephen Colbert put it the other night in a routine about vaccination policy south of the Medicine Line, “fans of living.”
No one knows exactly how Premier Smith’s perverse experiment in vaccine rationing will end, but you can count on it that it’ll end badly.
University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young called the new website the start of “the Vaccine Games.”
Mulling over how to describe this disaster in the making today, it occurred to me this could be called the formal beginning of UCP Death Panels.
Anyway, both sort of capture the spirit of the moment as Smith’s government goes about implementing what it called in a press release in June a “new approach to COVID-19 immunizations,” even if neither gets it quite right.
Dr. Young’s little joke notwithstanding, there is no competition to see who will be allowed to get the vaccine, of which Alberta’s pure MAGA Government plans to order hundreds of thousands of doses fewer than will be required. Just chaos. No one really knows what the mechanism will be for choosing who gets it.
We do know, as Alberta journalist Andrew Nikiforuk pointed out in The Tyee a week ago, “the Smith government has reduced the volume of available vaccine by nearly 250,000 doses. Last year the province administered 750,000 doses — largely to people over 50 years of age. This year the province has ordered only 485,000 doses, a 30 per cent reduction. That means a quarter of the population, again mostly the elderly, that wants the vaccine will not find it available.”
But it’s far too optimistic to hope there’s anything as well organized as a death panel behind this chaotic mess, or for that matter any kind of a panel. Frankly, I’d be surprised the cowed officials running this gong show for the UCP have any idea yet how they’re going to determine who gets the vaccine and who doesn’t.
The process is perversely – and clearly intentionally – complicated. It is obviously intended to discourage as many people as possible from getting the vaccine.
You’ll have to go to a limited number of public health clinics to get a shot. No more quick visits to a nearby pharmacy. “This decision makes no sense; it instead creates unfair barriers to those who work shifts, lack transportation, or are unable to get to vaccine-delivery locations,” wrote a group of public health experts in an Edmonton Journal op-ed last week.
“This ‘new approach’ creates obstacles to immunization against a serious vaccine-preventable disease that caused over 380 deaths last year — and unfairly disadvantages Albertans who would receive COVID shots free of charge anywhere else in the country,” the authors of the op-ed wrote.
“This policy is so bad that it’s actually worse than their usual failure to plan properly,” former Alberta chief medical officer of health James Talbot told Nikiforuk. “In fact, it is so bad it looks like they are actually planning to fail.”
You may wonder, Why the hell would a Canadian government do that? Well, Smith, her seldom-heard-from minister of preventative health services, Adriana LaGrange, or anyone in the UCP is certainly not going to tell us.
However, we can knowledgeably speculate:
First, everything Ms. Smith does is about her party’s next Annual General Meeting, where the people her predecessor Jason Kenney called “lunatics” are running the asylum. She knows very well that, just as the party’s anti-vaxx MAGA base ran Kenney out of town on a rail, they can do the same thing to her at the AGM. So if a few seniors have to die from COVID-19 to keep her on the job, so be it. That’s certainly part of this story.
Second, as Smith made obvious before her return to politics, during the years she toiled as a far-right radio talk show host, she is a crank and a vaccine conspiracy theorist enamoured of quack cures when it comes to COVID-19. Since she became premier, this kind of thinking has infected the entire government.
I would not be at all surprised if Smith hopes – even expects – that if we only infect enough people with COVID, we’ll reach herd immunity, just as was promised back in 2020 by the signatories to the now discredited Great Barrington Declaration – Dr. Johnny Fartpants, Dr. Person Fakename, Professor Notaf Uckingclue, and all the rest of them. And if the experiment fails and a bunch more seniors die, I’m sure she’s confident she can come up with an excuse people will believe.
Third, as Smith wrote in 2021 and has been acting on since becoming premier, she believes the secret to reforming health care, by which she clearly means privatizing it, is the introduction of fees and co-pays to soften the Canadian public up for the coming of U.S. style pay-to-survive health care.
What it’s not about, Ms. Smith’s claims to the contrary, is saving money or preventing waste of vaccine. This, as the authors of the op-ed pointed out, is a red herring since up to now Ottawa, not Alberta, has been paying for the vaccine doses. Moreover, vaccine manufacturers have now mostly changed their packaging to single-dose units, eliminating the problem entirely where implemented.
Obviously, Albertans need to tell their MLAs – especially their UCP MLAs, who are the ones who are enabling this lunacy – that they need to smarten up and follow national guidelines, and that their wanton disregard for the safety of others to suit a tiny minority MAGA fanatics at their AGM has been duly noted.
And if you’re a fan of living, let me say it again: you’d better go to BookVaccine.Alberta.ca or dial Health Link 811 now, or you may discover that you’re not eligible to receive the vaccine at all, no matter how vulnerable you are.
COVID-19 vaccines should be available for every Albertan who wants one. They should be available at pharmacies as well as public health clinics. And they should be free to all.
Alberta public health policy should be about health, not MAGA politics inside the UCP.
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