For some health-care professionals, the need for proof-of-vaccination remains a job requirement. Years after our governments first closed schools and locked down our society and economy in March 2020, some governments in Canada continue to wage a fanatical war against COVID-19. And as of April 2024, thousands of doctors, nurses and other health-care workers in BC are still prevented from returning to work because of their personal medical decision in 2021 not to get injected with the COVID vaccine. Today, hospitals in Ontario refuse to hire qualified nurses who chose not to get injected in 2021. Meanwhile, the BC and Ontario governments complain publicly about a shortage of health care workers. Is it ideology? Or is it pure vindictiveness that would cause the BC and Ontario governments to prevent qualified health-care professionals from working in 2024? Perhaps both? Where is the science? In September of 2021, when employers first began to threaten their employees with loss of employment unless they took the COVID-19 vaccine, there was no evidence that this vaccine would stop the spread. In former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford’s court challenge to the federal policy of preventing non-injected Canadians from travelling on airplanes, government officials admitted under oath that there was no medical or scientific basis to justify this discrimination. By Christmas of 2021, it was obvious that the vaccine had not stopped the spread of COVID. The Delta variant spread everywhere, including in countries with very high vaccination rates. The people of Gibraltar, of whom 97% took the COVID-19 vaccine, were told not to socialize or gather that Christmas. An employer could potentially be justified in requiring employees to take a vaccine, if that vaccine was proven to stop the spread of an unusually deadly virus. If the vaccine merely decreased the severity of illness but did not stop the spread of the virus, then each employee should be free to choose for herself, without coercion or pressure. Absent any evidence the COVID-19 vaccine stopped viral spread, thousands of Canadians were nevertheless forced into unemployment over a legitimate personal decision not to get injected with a brand-new vaccine that in the fall of 2021 was still in clinical trials. Terminated employees were denied EI benefits. Students were kicked out of universities and colleges. For example, single mothers Mariana Costa and Crystal Love were in the final year of their respective programs at Seneca College and had expected to begin their new careers in April 2022. Seneca effectively expelled both women for exercising their Charter right to bodily autonomy. Millions of Canadians were denied their right to participate in sports, eat in restaurants, enjoy movie theatres, use gyms, visit their elderly parents in nursing homes and travel outside of Canada. Canadians who took the COVID-19 vaccine (voluntarily or under duress) had to endure the routine violation of their medical privacy, needing to divulge personal health information to total strangers at gyms and restaurants. So why did governments pursue mandatory vaccination policies so aggressively, absent a scientific basis to show that such policies would actually stop the spread of COVID-19? Because of the fear resulting from the March 2020 predictions by Imperial College London that 40 million people would die of COVID-19 worldwide, including 510,000 in the United Kingdom and 2.2 million in the United States. It’s no wonder that people around the world were keen to accept any solution — no matter how costly — to avoid a virus that Imperial College London had compared to the Spanish Flu of 1918, which did kill tens of millions of people around the globe. The Imperial College modelling was discredited early on, by government data showing that COVID-19 had only a limited impact on overall population mortality. Age-adjusted death rates in 2020 differed little from 2019 and it remains unclear to what extent the small increase was caused by COVID-19 versus being caused by lockdown policies. But once fear sets in, people stop thinking. They instead look to authorities to be told what to do. Facts about COVID-19 not being an unusually deadly killer emerged early on, but they could not quell the fear. Whether colleges, universities, governments and private-sector employers should be forgiven for pressuring Canadians to take the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 will remain a topic of debate. What is inexcusable today is the vindictive, ideological insistence by the Ontario and BC governments that doctors and nurses cannot return to work, in April 2024, over exercising their Charter right to bodily autonomy. John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca), which provided lawyers for Brian Peckford’s court challenge
