Don't Go To Hospital Beds Angry

When we're all mad at the same people, we have to be extra careful not to do something stupid -- like a surtax on the unvaccinated

What, me worsen?

Historically, the only Québécois politicians who receive positive notices in Canada’s English-language media are Liberals, either federal or provincial (and even when, in the case of Thomas Mulcair, they somehow end up running the NDP for a while) — so it must have been surprising for François Legault to see that he was getting grudging admiration in the pages of the Toronto Star last week. “Even with the lack of details and the outstanding legal questions,” the paper said of his announcement that Québec’s COVID-unvaccinated would face a health surtax to recoup some of the damage they’re wreaking on the province’s hospitals (or else just to scare them into getting their shots), “the trial balloon lobbed by Legault was wildly successful however you look at it.” Finally, the columnist all but said, Québec’s government was using its minority-bashing powers for good.

Or maybe it wouldn’t have been surprising for Legault. The unvaccinated-by-choice are, at this point, very likely the most hated group in Canada, and, it should be said, not at all without reason. Like people blocking a doorway during a massive apartment fire, saying “Hmmmm, no, this staircase just isn’t right for my body,” the unvaccinated have been one of the greatest sources of social pain and pandemic-related system stress in wealthy countries ever since the nearly-miraculous introduction of the vaccines. One can only hear just so many stories of paediatric cancer patients having their treatments postponed, or know just so many suffering friends or family waiting for surgeries sent skittering indefinitely across the months of the calendar before losing one’s reserves of sympathy for whatever specific combination of trauma, ignorance, or hubris has made getting a vaccine such a challenge for some people.

Whenever any particular, identifiable sub-group in a democracy becomes the object of socially-sanctioned opprobrium and hatred, it’s time to tread carefully. This is even and perhaps especially true when the group has done something to deserve it. When governments or employers or ideologues are looking to effect a substantial ideological or administrative change, particularly one which they expect to meet with initial resistance, they nearly always begin their work on a subset of the deeply unpopular. Even if there’s no long-term, Machiavellian ploy at work, the violated rights and norms of the stigmatized would inevitably set a new standard for thinking about those rights and norms writ large. This used to be an understanding baked in to mainstream liberalism and non-Stalinist leftism: that it was precisely in protecting the formal legal and civil protections of the abjectly despicable and detestable that everyone’s rights were secured. Otherwise, society’s totally healthy and correct revulsion at bigots, sex offenders, terrorists, et al. would provide the blustering cover for the erosion of free speech, liberal-democratic justice, and civil liberties. That this is no longer an accurate description of the broad left-liberal understanding is not a point in favour of the broad liberal left.

Sitting back while a right-wing provincial leader announces that particular individual health choices, however sub-moronic, will now affect a citizen’s relationship as payee into our universal health care system is something like saying, “Say what you will about the Trojans, they build a hell of a horse.” The political right in this country has been looking for loose hinges for jimmying crowbars into Canada’s social medicine since just as it was getting started. Is anyone naïve enough to think that, having established that a very bad individual health decision that costs our system precious resources ought to move one into an outer, concentric circle of insurance premium coverage, that we won’t immediately see such a surtax proposed for, say, smokers? The obese? Drug users? Skiers? (At least they’ve got the money.)

The clear political lessons of the pandemic have everywhere been that the socialization of medicine needs expanding; that the market alone can’t be trusted even with pharmacology or elder care, let alone running emergency rooms. Our hospitals can never again be run this close to the bone as a matter of course, unable to withstand a stress test — our health care system was being run like a just-shy-of-over-leveraged bank, because the people who run actual over-leveraged banks don’t like paying taxes. Tough shit. After the pandemic, we’ll have to fill our hospitals with wiggle room, even if it means some people’s infinity pools don’t get heated in April or September.

Understanding the disaster of neoliberalism at the structural level doesn’t mean ignoring our frustration, or their responsibility, at the individual level. I’m all for hearing reasonable measures aimed at pressuring those who haven’t been willing to listen to reason or positive inducement to get vaccinated. But an added health tax not only isn’t the right medicine, it’s more of the poison that got us here: hyper-individualization and austerity thinking.

Just yesterday, Health Canada announced its approval of Pfizer’s anti-COVID antiretroviral pill. The extent to which this could be the deus ex machina in the struggle between unvaccinated irresponsibility and Canada’s hospital workloads remains to be seen — announcements were clear to to emphasize that these pills should not be thought of as an alternative to vaccination. The fact is, for many idiots, they will be; and for that, we should be very, very grateful.

In the meantime, we should watch out for “fixes” to the crisis that prey upon our angry instincts but will only make matters worse in the long-term. Benjamin Franklin’s famous aphorism emphasized that, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That’s true of vaccines — and it’s true of politics, too.