Is it almost over? The pandemic? It’s a question to which we would all love a definitive answer. But we don’t have one.
With the greed and ethical void that too often characterizes the pharmaceutical industry and with governments unwilling to force the release of patents so billions of people in the Global South can be vaccinated, COVID-19 continues to spread and mutate. And here in the Global North, many thousands of people refuse to get vaccinated, providing host bodies for viral transmission and mutation.
It may be the case that COVID will simply burn itself out or that future variants will be truly mild. Or it may be the case that a new and far more lethal variant emerges in the coming weeks and months. Together, we will all find out even if we are not actually all in this together, as some overly optimistic slogans would have it.
Beyond the loss of life, beyond the untold suffering associated with long COVID, beyond the burden on an already stressed health care system, beyond the economic impacts of rolling public health measures, there is the enormous sociopolitical cost that COVID has surfaced in ugly ways. Whatever strained civility marked our political conversations in years past, COVID has created a new political space of intolerance, Nazism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and searing discord.
The “Freedom Convoy”, with its many extreme political factions and voices, is the most troubling social fissure we have seen in the protracted pandemic.
The vast majority of us here in qathet are fully vaccinated against COVID. But while we are the vast majority, most of us also have friends or acquaintances who have chosen not to be vaccinated, and the dynamic between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated has created deep division for many of us.
Then there are those in the unvaccinated community who actively support some of the most vile views since Hitler’s Nazis. How do we relate to these members of society? How do we heal divisions that are not mere political differences but profoundly moral, existential matters?
We are in a perilous moment and true leadership on the way forward as a society has been scarce.
Our mayor has provided no leadership on the many hard edges of COVID, instead fanning the flames of what some call anti-vaxxer views in a series of public meetings a couple of months ago.
Our MLA has perhaps understandably said little, leaving public health communication to the minister of health and the provincial health officer. Our MP has, inexplicably, been virtually silent on the central challenge of our times.
And then there is Joseph McLean, the founder of the qathet COVID-19 Awareness Facebook group. That group now has 4,600 followers. In his frequent posts, Joseph does a remarkable job digesting complex public health data and explaining their implications. He endures a steady stream of hate mail for his efforts, along with the gratitude many of us express.
Many also encourage Joseph to run for city council in the hope that he would be willing to bring his intelligence and stellar community service to local government.
If you’re not a regular visitor to Joseph’s Facebook group, you may want to become one. His civil tone and unshakeable courage point the way forward for all of us as we wade through this seemingly endless pandemic.
John Young is a Powell River resident.
