I suspect that during the next few weeks we will see a huge sea-change in public attitudes around COVID and Government responses to COVID.
I base this belief on the changes I have seen in my wife Caty's attitudes over the past four weeks.
A month ago my wife was a big fan of vaccines. She would nag me frequently to get vaccinated. If our 11-year-old son had wanted to get vaccinated, she would have gotten him vaccinated in the first days he was eligible to be vaccinated. Caty was broadly accepting of Canadian Government COVID policies around masking, vaccines, vaccine mandates, and lock-down measures.
Up until four weeks ago, my wife's experience of the COVID pandemic was all second-hand. There had been only a modest number of COVID cases here on Vancouver Island, so her experience of the pandemic was based on what the mass media and Government figures had told her about COVID.
Omicron has changed all that.
On the afternoon of January 5th my wife developed symptoms of Omicron and called in sick to the group home where she works part-time. I developed symptoms twelve hours later. Our son Juan Diego became symptomatic just about the same time. By Friday my wife and I both had rapid-tested positive for COVID, presumably Omicron.
All three of us had symptoms very similar to ordinary flu: sore throat and headache, extreme thirst, and tiredness. The first thing my wife noticed is that my symptoms were no worse than hers, despite my being 23 years older, mildly asthmatic and unvaccinated. Juan Diego had an even milder case, despite being unvaccinated. If being vaccinated was supposed to make her far less sick with COVID, why she wasn't seeing it?
The next thing that was obvious to my wife was that the BC Government had abandoned us. We had dutifully registered our positive test results with the BC Government, including our emails and phone numbers, yet we heard absolutely nothing back from the BC Government during the whole time we were sick, not so much as even a form email.
My wife found it utterly astounding that two years into the COVID pandemic the BC Government couldn't come up with a single suggestion or recommendation for things she could do to reduce her chances of ending up in hospital. "Have they learned NOTHING in two years?" was her incredulous response.
My wife immediately informed the school where she works as an Education Assistant of her positive test result, and also informed the group home where she works part-time. Neither told her co-workers that she had tested positive, citing privacy concerns. This again astounded my wife: "We're all supposed to be doing everything we can to slow the spread of Omicron, but my co-workers can't be told they are close contacts to an active Omicron case?"
Three of the residents at her group home got Omicron despite being triple-vaccinated. So did another of the fully-vaccinated staff. Several other friends and co-workers and their families came down with Omicron. Most were fully vaccinated. They all had flu symptoms, nothing more.
My wife's response to all this is to notice that vaccines have been completely useless in preventing the spread of Omicron.
When she heard Governments back-pedalling, pretending that the purpose of vaccines had always been to prevent serious illness and death, she was furious. "We were all told that getting vaccinated was the responsible thing to do, that by getting vaccinated we would prevent others from getting infected with COVID. Do they think I've forgotten that?"
The only person my wife knows who died of Omicron is my 96-year-old father, who was triple-vaccinated. This has also has made my wife somewhat less enamoured with vaccines.
My wife had an appointment for a booster shot last week. She didn't go. She asked two co-workers who'd recovered from Omicron if they were planning to get booster shots. Both said they would only do so if the Government forced them. So perhaps my wife is not the only one in her circle who has been radicalized by Omicron.
Friday my wife came back from the grocery store worried by all the empty shelves she was seeing. She knew exactly who to blame. At a time when all of her fully-vaccinated friends and co-workers were catching Omicron, Justin Trudeau had decided it was too dangerous to let unvaccinated American truck-drivers into Canada, even though truck-driving is one of the most solitary jobs on the planet. She was furious with our Prime Minister.
There's one other thing that has radicalized my wife. Caty had been scheduled to receive a hip replacement this coming Wednesday. After waiting through a year of chronic pain she was really anxious to finally get beyond the pain.
We had been worried early in January that she might wake up in the recovery room after her surgery infected with Omicron. Omicron may be mild but we certainly didn't want her to catch it while recovering from major surgery. We both felt relieved when she tested positive for Omicron, because we knew that it meant she would be safe from Omicron when it came time for her surgery.
We hadn't counted on the complete incompetence of the BC Ministry of Health. Eight weeks into the Omicron wave and their protocols for surgery post-COVID are still based on Delta. Delta was pretty heavy-duty sometimes, so I suppose it made sense to decree that no-one should get surgery for at least seven weeks after Delta.
Omicron is mild. The surgery risks now are very different. There's a very good chance that whoever gets a new hip in the surgery slot my wife was slated for on Wednesday will have had Omicron more recently than my wife did. They just won't have been tested for it. And that's the best outcome. The worst outcome is that whoever gets that new hip will wake up in the recovery room with an active case of Omicron. You'd think that eight weeks into the Omicron wave, the BC Government would have adjusted their post-COVID surgery protocols to fit these new realities. They haven't. (We asked, and the surgery wasn't cancelled by my wife's surgeon. It was cancelled because the surgeon was required to follow the BC Ministry of Health's outdated protocols.)
My wife immigrated to Canada from Ecuador eight years ago. The Government of Ecuador has a well-deserved reputation for being corrupt and inefficient. My wife thought one of the big advantages of moving to Canada was that Government here was less dysfunctional than the Government of Ecuador. Caty has now lost whatever illusions she once had in that regard. She feels like a victim of the system.
I suspect millions of Canadians are now finding themselves in the same position as my wife: Needing to choose between what government and the media tell them about Omicron, and what they know directly from their own experience. I expect most will trust their own experience over anything Governments or the mass media try to tell them. That will change everything.
It's not just in Canada that things are changing. Listen to Bari Weiss speaking out against cloth masks, school closures and vaccine mandates on the Bill Mayer Show. Listen to the enthusiastic cheering from Maher's liberal Democrat audience - the last people you would expect to have that response!
Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau should both now be thinking about what they want to do after they leave political office, because that may happen sooner than they think.
P.S.: There were thousands at yesterday's protest at the BC legislature to mark a world day of protest against the vaccine mandates. Today a rally of several hundred trucks driving around downtown Victoria drew public attention to Trudeau's destructive trucking mandate.
At a huge Defeat-The-Mandates rally today in Washington, DC, a star-studded list of speakers enthralled a spirited crowd of 30,000 protesters. The CBC, AKA Canadian Propaganda Corporation, wasn't allowed to report on any of these events, of course. No wonder I Will Not Comply has been the most popular country song of the past year!
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