Believing in free speech is difficult - Keith Roulston editorial

Canada is in a rough spot. On one hand, we believe that even people in small minorities have a right to voice their opinions. On the other, minorities are trying to drive the agenda.
   

We knew, for instance, that trying to get kids vaccinated against the COVID-19 pandemic was not going to be easy. How 
else do you explain the fact that schools aren’t front and centre in the attempt to get as many kids vaccinated as quickly as possible. Going all the way back to the introduction of the polio vaccine in the 1950s, schools were the centres for fast vaccination of the youthful population.
   

Right now, with most of the adult population with at least two shots, if not three, a disturbingly large part of the surging number of people with COVID-19 is kids in schools. And yet there are parents out there, even those who are double-vaccinated themselves, who resist getting their kids vaccinated. Some just want their neighbour’s kids to be the guinea-pigs. If the first kids to be vaccinated don’t have serious problems, they’ll book an appointment for their own kids.
   

But then there are the serious anti-vaxxers. Out in northern B.C., an RCMP officer says protesters outside a COVID-19 vaccine clinic for children have been warned  that their actions are illegal. About a dozen people voiced their opinion against vaccines at a clinic in Prince George recently, and some of them followed families to their vehicles.
   

Protests against COVID-19 measures in Canada and Europe have become more violent lately, at the same time as a new variant and winter conditions have brought a greater spread of the disease. So far  more than 36,000 kids between the ages of five and 11 have been infected. The number increases each week. 
   

Listening to the local news I learned that an Owen Sound high school had reverted to on-line learning because of an outbreak of COVID-19. Yet high school students have been eligible for COVID-19 shots since late May. 
   

More excusable is the worsening situation in elementary schools because there has been less time for students to get vaccinated with the smaller dosage of 10 micrograms of mRNA instead of the adult dose of  30 micrograms. Still, if parents agreed and schools were willing, we could have a far higher percentage of kids being vaccinated at this point than we have – and fewer cases with infections.
   

As of Sunday (the most recent figures as I write this) almost 700 cases involved people who are unvaccinated, partially vaccinated or with unknown vaccination status. The remaining 700-plus infections involved people  fully vaccinated. It’s not perfect, yet considering that 11.3 million (76.6 per cent) of the Ontario population are fully vaccinated, that’s a small percentage. 
   

Yet the situation is serious. Nearly 30,000 Canadians have died because of COVID-19. Some anti-vaxxers deny this, of course. Some of them are sure that these figures are inflated to scare them into compliance. Others think the figures are invented completely to get them to go along with the warnings of health officials.
   

It’s hard to put yourself inside the head of an anti-vaxxer. Why should health officials want to go along with the idea that COVID-19 cases are either really inflated or just made up? If the COVID-19 issue isn’t so serious, why would a doctor who specialized in heart surgery willingly sit by and watch a patient deteriorate or even die because there is no room for them in hospital? Recently, as the emergence of the Omicron variant spread and alarmed the medical community, relatives of people whose surgeries had already been delayed by COVID-19 were heard protesting.
   

So if these anti-vaxxers aren’t listening to the medical professionals as they fight against COVID-19, who are they listening to? Well chock one up for today’s freedom of information. You can find, somewhere in the universe that has been introduced to us by the internet, someone who will take the side of just about any argument. I’m sure there were those who spoke out against polio vaccines 60 years ago but they had to fight to be heard. In today’s Twitterverse, anyone can be heard.
   

As a believer in free speech, I have to go along with that. But there’s a price to pay for all freedoms and unfortunately lives will be lost because of that freedom of belief. By the time you read this, 800,000 Americans will have died from COVID-19-related illnesses (that would have totalled about 286,000 deaths if their numbers were similar to Canada’s).
   

There’s a price to pay for freedom of speech. There’s a price to pay for ignoring the danger of COVID-19. All we can do is keep arguing, trying to open the eyes of those whose ignorance is costing people their lives.