[nahname]

Ottawa was tricky because the jurisdiction belongs to the OPS, which fumbled the entire situation from beginning to end. It wasn't entirely clear if that was intentional either. The RCMP (federal) was brought in to break up the protests, but there was a lot of stone walling from the conservative provincial government.

There is also a world of difference between an organized protest with a specific purpose drawing awareness to a cause and thousands of people using commercial vehicles to hold a city hostage with no purpose or agenda other than a bunch of angry people unleashing their rage on the cities populous.

[frabbit]

It was not tricky at all. CSIS (Canadian FBI equivalent) made it clear to concerned parties in government that there was no armed\violent threat[1], despite the official\reputable news media[2] claiming this repeatedly.

As regards your world of difference argument. Most of the important protests that have changed anything have involved not simple, passive attemtps to "draw awareness to a cause", but actually causing a good deal of deliberate loss of income, convenience, security and comfort. (see the suffragettes, the stonewall riots, the montgomery alabama lunch counter boycotts, chartists in 1848 etc).

The truckers, whether you agreed with them or not, were peaceful and intent on using that peaceful protest to force a change in their society. They were met with co-ordinated media defamation, the invocation of a power which should only be used in war time and the seizing of their supporters funds. Pretty much standard behavior for a Western democracy getting squeezed and needing to ditch the facade of democracy and revert to good old fashioned authoritarianism. It's never far from the surface.

1. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/csis-told-government-... 2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-rcmp-convoy-violence-1...

[idunnoman1222]

No agenda? How many mandated shots before you join the protest? 5..10? these people were just protesting at >1

[verandaguy]

The shots weren't mandated. You couldn't enjoy services like cross-country travel by air or rail, but the shots were absolutely not mandated to do most things -- at least, not by the government. To the vast majority of Canadians, those are not essential services for survival, and to those Canadians for whom they are (mostly those living in northern communities), they got about the usual amount of support they get from any federal government (which is to say, not enough, and that probably merits more discussion than the convoy protesters).

- If you worked from an office, you likely spent a good chunk of the first 12-24 months of Covid working from home. After that, it was up to your employer to put into place a policy about that.

  - Addendum: if you were in the federal government, you *were* required to get an initial shot plus a booster for most parts of the federal government. Failure to do so was dealt with in a few ways depending on department, but would usually result in your being placed on unpaid leave (PSAC has made it very difficult to fire someone in general, including under these circumstances).

- If you worked a blue-collar job, what happened was massively up to your employer. Construction in particular slowed down in cities because of the extra precautions taken to avoid turning worksites into superspreader events.

- If you worked in the Forces, I gather you really didn't have much of a say in the matter, but militaries worldwide have strict and extensive vaccine schedules for all enlisted staff (and often officers, too).

The bodily autonomy argument holds some water, sure, to the same extent as you have the choice not to vaccinate your kid as they start going to school (but don't be surprised if they can't go, because we as a society have decided that things like polio don't deserve a repeat performance).

You were at no point prohibited from leaving the country, though you could de facto end up so because other countries likely wouldn't allow you in, at least, not without a Covid test.

If you were a Canadian citizen, you could not be legally denied entry into Canada, though because of the circumstances you may have been, at different points, required to either undergo a test or to go through a quarantine period.

These people were protesting being denied the ability to pick and choose what they do in society while unilaterally picking and choosing how much additional risk they want to introduce to the rest of society.

Frankly, this is probably best showcased by them deciding to just decide to take over the Ottawa baseball stadium (which is in a suburb and next to a highway) and use it and a few other places around downtown to store propane, gas, and other heating fluids since they decided to do this in the winter.

They were, at best, hypocrites, and massively reckless in the face of what was at the time still relatively speaking a medical unknown.

I'll also add, Re: the use of the Emergencies Act: regardless of what I think, a federal court has ruled it unconstitutional; the government has expressed interest in appealing the decision. I don't have a legal background, so I don't have a useful comment to add here.

I will say that it came after several weeks of multiple levels of police (but most notably, OPS) failing to do anything about the protests while tensions escalated, so it didn't come out of nowhere, and it wasn't the first thing the government tried.

[ifyoubuildit]

> how much additional risk they want to introduce to the rest of society.

Even at the time, despite very strong claims from on high to the contrary, it was becoming more and more clear that the only people who might benefit from the shots were those taking them (and the people selling them of course).

It’s surprising to me to still see people making the "social good" argument in 2024.

[verandaguy]

Got a source on that? Virus transmission as a field of epidemiology is in general decently understood, and while vaccines aren't a panacea for everyone in every circumstance, herd immunity absolutely exists and is an effective way of reducing the spread of viruses at scale, sometimes significantly so.

Boosters were required as frequently as they were because Covid was developing new variants faster than things we're used to (like the flu, which tends to have about one variant a year with high infection rates among humans). Naturally, many people do get flu "booster" shots annually to try and reduce the spread of what's still a deadly disease to the immunocompromised; we just don't talk about it much because flu death rates have roughly stabilized for long enough that they're not considered excessive deaths (in the actuarial sense).

[ifyoubuildit]

> herd immunity absolutely exists

Yes. Who said otherwise?

> and is an effective way of reducing the spread of viruses at scale, sometimes significantly so.

I don't follow. Doesn't herd immunity mean the herd is immune? As in, there is no transmission and the pathogen either dies or fades to the background?

Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.

The strongest point in favor of the "social good" argument is that the shots reduced severity of infection, thereby reducing hospitalizations and freeing up hospital beds for random accidents. But the overflowing hospitals issue wasnt nearly as bad as it was made out to be as I understand it. And we'll probably never know for sure how many hospitalizations were caused by the shots themselves, because only lunatics think that something with vaccine in the name can harm you.

[verandaguy]

> I don't follow. Doesn't herd immunity mean the herd is immune? As in, there is no transmission and the pathogen either dies or fades to the background?

In a perfect world where everyone gets vaccinated and vaccines are 100% effective in all people against all individuals of a strain, yeah, probably. In reality, not everyone gets vaccinated, and not everyone reacts well to the vaccine, and sometimes individuals from a strain slip by, so no. Some individuals from a strain will survive, some people will catch it and get sick, and of those surviving the sickness, they'll become the breeding ground for a new mutation.

> Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.

Source? The latest data shows that out of ~40 million Canadians, about 4.8 million or about 12% are reported to have tested positive for Covid at any point and been recorded as such. Globally, the figure is about 775 million out of 8 billion[0].

Among vaccinated Canadians, CCDR 2024 Vol. 50 published by the PHAC[1] shows that both despite waning immunity from the vaccines (which is partially attributable to the poor understanding of what would both be safe for humans and long-term effective against Covid) as well as the emergence of new variants both causing spikes in overall case count and associated stats (like hospital admissions and deaths), vaccinated people were measurably less likely to contract the disease and to fall severely ill if they did. This is roughly in line with your comment about vaccines reducing infection severity.

The study is a relatively quick read and I encourage you to give it a look if you have the stomach for medical statistics (which admittedly is pretty dry). The methodology is nothing special, but not problematic IMO, and the sample size and population distribution are good for a study of this scale (though there's an overrepresentation of the unvaccinated relative to the Canadian population; in this case, it likely doesn't represent an issue).

    [0] https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases?n=c
    [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/canada-communicable-disease-report-ccdr/monthly-issue/2024-50/issue-1-2-january-february-2024/covid-19-outcome-trends-vaccination-status-canada.html

[marcosdumay]

> it was becoming more and more clear that the only people who might benefit from the shots were those taking them

Do you have any evidence at all of that? AFAIK, none exist.

What exists is some weak evidence the vaccine severely reduced the transmission of the virus. I've never seen any study strong enough to be proof, but then this is extremely hard to measure (either way it goes).