Juno News - September 25, 2021


Is Ontario's vaccine passport causing more problems than expected？


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

203.68898

Word count

854

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ontario's new vaccine passport is causing a bit of a stir in the health care system. Is it a good or bad thing? And what will it mean for our health care workers and the public at large?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Ontario's vaccine passport has only been in place for a few days, but anecdotally, it seems like
00:00:10.020 it's causing a whole lot more trouble than it's worth. A divisive project that we're soon going
00:00:15.080 to be asking ourselves, what on earth was the point of all of this? Now, obviously other provinces
00:00:21.420 in Canada have a passport, and other jurisdictions across the Western world have introduced this as
00:00:25.980 well. I'm going to focus my comments on what's going on in Ontario, because that's where I'm
00:00:29.520 hearing the most number of reports on the ground. First of all, one question that's really
00:00:33.640 interesting is the number of people who are choosing to opt out of it, either because they
00:00:38.120 are not vaccinated or because they are vaccinated, but they just don't support this happening in
00:00:43.180 society, this level of division. I've heard from regular folks saying, I'm just not doing
00:00:47.740 this stuff. I'm not going to the restaurants. I'm not going to the movies while they're doing this
00:00:51.420 show me your papers thing. I don't support society devolving into that situation. I've actually heard
00:00:56.300 from two hospital doctors who work on the front lines, who treat COVID patients, who certainly
00:01:01.420 support doing everything possible to stop people from having serious outcomes with this illness,
00:01:06.620 and these doctors also administer vaccines. They told me they're not going to restaurants or going
00:01:12.020 to the movies or what have you, because they are opting out of it. They are not supporting the
00:01:16.340 passport on issues of principle and issues of equity and fairness as they explain it. You go,
00:01:21.560 wow, if you're hearing that from people in the healthcare profession, I mean,
00:01:24.540 what are the views in broader society? I really hope that those people at least who said, yes,
00:01:29.560 we need a vaccine passport. That's what I need in place to quote unquote, feel safe.
00:01:34.000 I kind of want to say, okay, you've got it. Are you at least out and about living your lives now?
00:01:37.900 Or is this just another excuse, another kind of barrier that you put in place for yourself
00:01:42.540 psychologically to not learn to live with COVID as many chief medical officers of health throughout
00:01:48.280 Canada have now been saying we must do. So that's one concern. Another concern is just all the
00:01:53.500 anecdotes. Some of them are going viral as videos that we're seeing of people being denied service.
00:01:58.140 I saw a video of an old lady who was kicked out of McDonald's. She said, oh, I am vaccinated,
00:02:03.180 but I don't have the paperwork or I just, I don't have the right iPhone. Come on. Can I stay? No,
00:02:08.760 out you go. Hearing lots of stories and reports of that. I heard from one parent whose, uh, whose
00:02:14.000 children were kicked out of McDonald's for not being vaccinated, not showing their paperwork. Lots of
00:02:19.360 odd stories like that. I'm also hearing stories about the vaccine passport not being enforced in
00:02:24.640 many locations. People saying, well, I went to my gym. They didn't ask for it. People telling me they
00:02:29.600 went to a restaurant and the issue just wasn't brought up. Now I am not saying that to, to rat
00:02:35.000 them out and say, we must have stricter enforcement and so forth. But it's just kind of funny that those
00:02:39.860 people who, who, who, who passionately said we need these passports in place. Well, now we're seeing
00:02:44.980 that, look, it's just not actually going to be enforced by many places. I also wonder to what
00:02:50.060 degree is it that, that neighborhoods where people are much more inclined to be COVID busy bodies in
00:02:56.100 terms of really stressing out about this stuff. Will those neighborhoods, will those customers,
00:03:00.600 will those businesses feel the pressure from their customers to enforce the passport? Whereas
00:03:05.360 other neighborhoods where people are, are less, uh, sort of COVID busy bodies, are those places going
00:03:11.880 to be less inclined to enforce it. And we're going to see all of that happen. I'm sure we're going to
00:03:15.820 see drama where a certain media outlets want to name and shame places that are not enforcing the
00:03:20.960 rules. It's going to be a mess. There's also these rather troubling headlines about how a number of
00:03:27.120 hospitals, uh, we got the numbers on the record for Windsor hospital and Kingston hospital that
00:03:31.920 they've let go well over 100 employees over the vaccine rules. You go, whoa, hold on a second. I thought
00:03:37.700 the point of the vaccine passport, whether you support it or not was okay. We can't have 1.00
00:03:41.660 another lockdown. We can't have hospitals at capacity. This is going to help us avoid that
00:03:45.920 situation. And yet now we see these vaccine rules are actually causing problems with hospital
00:03:52.640 staffing. The vaccine rules may in fact create the next hospital crisis. So bottom line, we're only a
00:03:59.820 few days into this and things already seem to be a bit of a mess. Lots of inconsistencies and you've
00:04:05.240 got to ask, and you got to ask this to people who support the passport the most. Is this worth all of
00:04:11.060 the trouble?