October 25, 2021
About Last Spring: The Vaccine Narrative I’m Holding On To
I’ve almost forgotten about last spring. Have you?
Because it’s been about 300 years since then, I think. We had a federal election, and a summer of climate emergencies, and the anxiety of school reopening, and real life returning, albeit slowly and cautiously here in Ontario, which seems to be paying off with a flattened curve, thank goodness. KNOCK ON WOOD.
But all this has been much overshadowed by the noise of a very small minority of our community members who distrust and refuse vaccines, community members whose grasp of science is perhaps as slight as their grasp of public relations—because I could have told them that the tactic of blocking hospital entrances and yelling at sick people receiving life-saving treatment was probably never going to win much support. A small minority of our community members who seem empowered by the idea that they’re part of a much larger movement, an illusion that fizzles out when you check out statistics such as that 73.7% of Canadians are fully vaccinated or that 87.9% of all eligible Ontarians have received at least once dose. Also 77.96% of Canadian 12-17-year-olds are fully or partially vaccinated, which seems to bode well for uptake once vaccines for 5-11-year-olds become available (and BRING IT ON!).
It’s such a far cry from the “vaccine-hesitancy” message that the media insisted on perpetuating as soon as vaccines were available, even as people were lining up around the block in the rain at 4 o’clock in the morning to get them. And it’s a far cry too from the anti-vax messaging we’ve been hearing from last hold-outs over the last two months, people who are becoming more and more desperate to own the narrative as it slips further and out of their grasp, and it becomes clearer that almost everyone you know believes in the Covid-19 vaccine project.
Back in April, however, there was no doubt about this. Just six months ago, at the peak of a devastating fourth wave that saw patients in field hospitals and pregnant women in ICUs, the Astrazenaca Vaccine was approved for people over 40, and suddenly we had a surge in vaccinations here in Ontario that brought us into a new era of immunity, one whose payoffs we’re all benefiting from right now, whether we’re vaccinated or not.
None of this was inevitable—we came into this new year hoping to get our first doses by September, if that. Opposition parties spent the first few months of 2021 bitching about the government’s “botched vaccination rollout,” never mind that we were lucky that vaccines existed at all. I remember the first person I knew in Canada who got a shot, a friend who’s a first responder, and we made him a celebratory card. In England, my mother-in-law got her shot. Other friends who worked in healthcare were vaccinated. And then there began to be more of it—friends who are Indigenous, those with underlying conditions. Every single one of these shots such a victory for every single one of us, bringing us one step closer to the project of herd immunity. There was a whole lot of crying for joy. And then in April, my parents had their shots. My mom got hers on Easter Sunday when we were in town for an outdoor visit, masks on. What a miracle, it seemed like. It was really happening. We just had to hold on, keep going.
I remember a few weeks later, it was Sunday night. Just hours after I’d read news headlines about AZ being approved for those over 40, I got a text from my friend M alerting me to appointments available at our local Shoppers Drug Mart the following week. I received that text while having a bath, and leapt right out again, dripping wet, wrapped in a towel, and phoned Shopper’s Drug Mart, which closed at 10:00. It was 9:30. I had to call back a couple of times before I got through, but when I did, I snagged an appointment for Stuart and I for the following Wednesday. And then I texted the news to my friend K, and my friend R, and both of them would get appointments for that very same week. I helped another pal get an appointment out of town. Other friends would also find appointments through similar ways, and still others could not get appointments at all and were angry and frustrated that they seemed so hard to come by. Huge teams of volunteers (Vaccine Hunters!) began helping to track down vaccine appointments online for complete strangers. On my neighbourhood Facebook group, people were sharing news of availability. More and more appointments were being rolled out all the time, and people were stepping up, helping others step up, and it was one of the most terrific examples of COMMUNITY that I’ve ever been witness to, let alone been apart of.
Not to mention the amazing public health agencies who made the whole thing happen. Sometimes even though it seemed like a systematic disaster—the lack of a central booking portal, random allocations of doses, the significant problem of vaccine availability not being accessible where infection rates were highest. Oh, it was a mess, such a mess, but it was also such a massive endeavour, and by the time I was booking my second appointment and even an appointment for my 12-year-old (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?) things were smoother, and eventually there stopped being so much to complain about, and by the onset of summer, nearly everyone I know was fully vaccinated.
And this is the vaccine narrative that I’m going to be holding on to. What a rush and what an honour it was to be part of this singular moment, a moment that helped us turn a corner onto much better days and whatever comes after this. (We understand too that Covid-19 vaccines need to be made accessible to people all over the world—and to that end, UNICEF Canada recently raised $9.5 million for their #GiveaVax campaign, to be matched by the government of Canada.)
I’m so grateful to the millions and millions of people who got us here, and the way that each and every one them underlined my faith in people and my neighbours and US.
