During her first three weeks in office, Alberta’s new Premier Danielle Smith has already put her finger on the segregation of unvaccinated Canadians, and apologized to government employees who lost their jobs because of their vaccination status. Has the time come for a broader review of last year’s 'Fall of Shame?'.In order to keep their jobs or continue their education, millions of Canadian employees and students were coerced to accept vaccination in late 2021. Few stood their ground and rejected the unwanted medical procedure. If they did, it often had dire consequences on their incomes and social standing..Take an instructor who lost all her courses as well as her graduate student status, for declining to declare her personal medical status to her post-secondary institution. Or, a long-time sessional instructor who was dismissed from one week to the next from the courses she taught at an Ontario university, while she continued teaching for a college in the same building! These young women were part of the precarious academic workforce who have to fight for new teaching contracts each year. Other instructors were placed on unpaid leaves or outright fired. That included black scholars and members of other equity-seeking groups. Yet, our cherished principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion were shamefully set aside during the pandemic..Many other workers gave in to the pressure and took the injections. For example to save his 30-year career, a biomedical researcher at a Toronto hospital was coerced into vaccination. Within days of his second injection, he developed pain and numbness throughout his body. Diagnosed with functional neurological disorder, his life is in ruins. The vaccine injury was eventually confirmed, and two doctors are now under investigation for declining to report the adverse event. His disability was recently approved as a workplace injury. He has also been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome, due to the bullying experienced in conjunction with the workplace vaccination mandate..Or consider a fine-arts student who suffers from cardio-vascular issues and general exhaustion after giving in to her university’s campus vaccination mandate. Her life was turned upside down for the simple wish to complete her degree. She is now part of a group of students who took their university to court over unnecessarily forcing its vulnerable student population to undergo an unsafe medical experiment. A new one-hour documentary film made in the UK, “Safe and Effective — A Second Opinion,” illustrates the fate of COVID-19 vaccine-injured people, a group whose suffering is often met with disbelief, derision and denial by health-care providers, journalists, and the public..Did you even notice that your colleague 'disappeared' during the 2021 Fall of Shame? Do you demand that others be force-medicated, to protect your health? Then you should ask yourself some important ethical and practical questions. For example, what is the threshold for mandating a procedure for the benefit of others when the recipient incurs a known risk, however “rare” it may be? And who gets to determine whether a procedure is even suitable to achieve the stated goal?.Looking no further than the ongoing crisis, we have to realize that numerous experts overestimated the threat of COVID-19, overstated the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns) and vaccines, and ignored the broader, systemic implications of public health policies. Impartial cost-benefit assessments of the pandemic response measures continue to be ignored. And incredibly, many public and private-sector employers are upholding their foolish COVID-19 vaccination mandates to this day!.One of the most shameful moments of that fall of 2021 was when the Ontario Human Rights Commission issued a policy statement limiting the “duty to accommodate,” in the context of COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The statement essentially supported a narrow enough definition of medical and creed-based grounds so that employers could easily deny vaccine exemption requests. Moreover, various courts and labour arbitrators decided against employees seeking exemptions or medical privacy — with reference to the choice available to these workers. But, what kind of choice is it which implies the immediate loss of your income, career and professional network?.Many dissenters have been deeply and permanently alienated from their work and personal environments. If our elected representatives, social justice activists, corporate leadership, and Canadian society as a whole truly valued equity, empathy — or even simple kindness — we would start to see some sincere apologies on the first anniversary of these workplace grievances..We would also see meaningful compensation paid out for the perversions of the 2021 Fall of Shame. And Canadians would open their eyes, their arms, and their minds and understand that their colleague 'doing her own research' and their neighbour insisting on freedom and bodily autonomy are not a fringe group holding “unacceptable views." Rather, they are human beings like themselves, people who deserve to be heard, respected and cherished in all their diversity of experiences and opinions..Dr. Claus Rinner is a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, (formerly Ryerson University.)
