Alternative to Vaccination?
Alternative Solution?Some government officials have the desire to make Covid-19 vaccination mandatory. According to them, vaccination is the solution to the pandemic. Yet, there are outliers even amongst the politicians who disagree. It seems that some people want to see a different solution. Why? What could be their reasoning?
A potential rejection for the vaccination is the following argument. People always try to find the fastest and cheapest solution to everything nowadays. For example, in the past few decades women had to go to work to supplement the family income. This meant that nobody had the time to cook at home anymore. Of course, the food industry came up with a solution. They created fast and cheap food, sold in fast-food restaurants and in grocery stores. Naturally, or rather unnaturally, this solution meant adding food preservatives, colouring and other human made chemicals to the food. Another example is modernization in general. With the birth of the industrial revolution, human beings had faster and cheaper living conditions. Humanity made advances in anything from transportation to hot showers. However, all these fast and cheap conveniences came at a cost. Fast and cheap food made people overweight and sick. Modernization in general caused an impending environmental catastrophe. These and other examples made people rethink the value of fast and cheap solutions.
Then, the Covid-19 virus has arrived. Instantly, all governments wanted a fast and possibly cheap solution to the crisis. It was understandable that they wanted to move fast; people were dying after all. So, they came up with the vaccine. The idea was that if they vaccinate everybody, the crisis can be over fast and it will not cost a lot. However, some people rejected this solution. Many simply had enough of the idea of fast and cheap, based on previous experiences. They would rather find an alternative solution that is not necessarily fast and cheap with its possibility to come back to bite them later on; but, something that is still effective.
What are these potential alternative solutions? First, to focus specifically on Canada, this country has one of the lowest hospital bed availability amongst the developed countries. For every 1000 Canadians, there are 1.95 hospital beds available. In the countries belonging to the European Union, for every citizen, there are 5.4 hospital beds available. Basically, these countries have more than two and a half more hospital beds for every 1000 people. So, if Canadians had more hospital beds with more doctors and nurses working in the hospitals, the crisis would not be as great as it is now.
Another potential solution that can help people all over the world is treatment. From the beginning, scientists and doctors knew that the Covid-19 virus is 96% survivable. This means that only 4% of the people are in a dire situation. If scientists put more effort into finding a proper treatment, the rest of the 96% of the population could just go on living as before. Instead, they tried the fast and cheap solution of trying to vaccinate everybody, which is impossible. The problem isn’t just the people who have had enough of the fast and cheap solutions society has been obsessed with for hundreds of years. The problem is also logistical. To be effective, healthcare workers would have to vaccinate all seven billion people at once. A piecemeal solution does not work because, by the time they finish vaccinating one part of the world, on the other part of the world, a new variant appears. However, the logistics of vaccinating everbody all at once cannot be worked out simply because the richest countries are hoarding the vaccines and the companies that are manufacturing the vaccines are too greedy to share their recipes. So, fast and cheap just does not work. The holdouts want a treatment for those who need it and they want the rest of the people to be left alone. They had it with the continuous harassment from the government to line up for yet another dose of vaccine.
People want better. At least, the few holdouts who had enough of fast and cheap solutions do. They want a more viable solution in the form of enough hospital beds and well-designed treatments. It is much easier to focus on those who are really sick in the hospitals, then, to endlessly harassing everybody. Treatment is also less likely to cause any dreaded and currently unknown long-term health effects the many may suffer from vaccination. Treatment is limited to those who are ill while the vaccine can affect the population at large. It is just logical to push governments in general to come up with some kind of a sensible and viable solution, instead of harassing the holdouts to the process who had enough of fast and cheap solutions that usually come back to bite people later on, just as they did in the case of fast and cheap food and fast and cheap modernization in general.
