Editor:
A Feb. 16, 2022 letter from Vancouver Coastal Health’s chief medical officer to the president of UBC begs some significant questions with regard to the future of public dialogue around the last two years of COVID response.
In the letter, Dr. Patricia Daly and her three medical officers asserted that mandatory vaccine policies in environments such as universities have adverse consequences that outstrip those of COVID. The university accepted the letter’s conclusions and dropped plans to deregister students who have refused to declare their vaccination status.
Unintended consequences of policies like lockdowns, mandatory masking, and vaccine mandates and our liberty to have them fully and transparently discussed in public is the issue Dr. Daly’s letter highlights.
The outcome of a single-focused response (lockdowns until an injectable drug therapy can be deployed) has been a host of effects including but not limited to an aggravated drug abuse crisis, chilling increases in youth and young adult mental health trauma, a crippled small business community, public indebtedness that will burden generations to come, and, perhaps most distressingly, a skeletonized health care system that appears in no way re-organized or prepared to treat any future communicable disease outbreak.
Can we, as Dr. Daly has refreshingly shown, have open investigation into these, and many other, COVID-related concerns. Or will Dr. Bonnie Henry suggest that the VCH professionals are not suited to a medical career? Will Premier John Horgan say that the four signees need to get some hobbies? Will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gravely describe them as a small fringe minority with unacceptable views?
We are well past the moment when silencing medical professionals with diverse public health perspectives is an acceptable policy. If we can, as we are told, expect more pandemics, then we need better than that.
Lionel Hughes, Gambier Island
