Ask for vaccine passport or lose business
It seems a few restaurant and club business owners will be refusing to enforce the vaccine passport mandate due shortly.
My position will be quite clear: Should I not be asked to show a vaccine passport on entering such premises, I will decline to patronize the place.
Why should I sit across a table where unvaccinated people congregate? Anti-vaxxers will go to such places simply because they can get in. If these business owners wish to pander to the minority of anti-vaxxers who seem not to care who they infect, then that is their choice.
These businesses might have to face losing the custom of the majority who support our province’s health-care measures.
The customer is always right. It won’t take long before any rebel businesses shape up and enforce the passport if they are boycotted by the majority.
Nev Hircock
Parksville
Stop signs, red lights and vaccinations
In response to the letter-writer who questions the ethical move of the government coercing people to get their vaccines by mandating vaccination passports: While I agree it is our right to have the freedom to decide whether we choose to vaccinate or not, we still have a responsibility for our actions.
If our actions in life can affect the well-being of others, then the majority of people will make the reasonable choice to protect those around them.
Unfortunately, not everybody thinks like that, and hence the government enacts laws or orders mandates to protect the majority from the minority who think it is their right to have the freedom to do as they wish without consideration for others.
For example, I can go to a pub and have a few glasses of wine, but if I choose to drive myself home I am potentially endangering innocent people and can be charged with drinking and driving.
I can no longer go to a restaurant and smoke a cigarette since the effects of second-hand smoke are well known.
I don’t run red lights and stop signs. I fail to see where the vaccination passport to participate in non-essential activities is any different from these examples.
Carol Masters
|North Saanich
Be careful with ostracizing others
It appears, from the authoritarian hauteur of the majority of recent letters on the subject of vaccine passports, that most British Columbians now firmly support medical apartheid.
There seems suddenly to be no sympathy or even understanding in the offing for the many citizens who, for a variety of genuine medical reasons, cannot be vaccinated.
Opposition to vaccination on these and other legitimate cultural or religious grounds is now lumped in with being “anti-vax” and scathingly condemned as “putting us all at risk.”
Foremost among the inquisitor class are certain public health officials who have proclaimed that no exceptions to the passport mandate will be permitted and those who cannot be vaccinated will simply be shut out of society; too bad, so sad.
These same officials have recently publicly implied that if the citizenry is suffering under masking and distancing rules, the unvaccinated are responsible and to blame. This is divisive and appalling.
To those who are so quick to demand laws that ostracize and marginalize people due to circumstances not of their making and beyond their control, I can only say: Be very careful what you wish for.
Richard Lambert
Victoria
A special thanks to the unvaccinated
Just want to thank the unvaccinated for taking us all back six months to the height of the pandemic we had just fought our way out of.
Mike Holt
Victoria
Two simple injections will reduce the risk
Re: “Many health crises are avoidable,” letter, Aug. 28.
The letter-writer correctly points out that alcohol abuse, narcotics addiction and obesity contribute to hospitalizations and deaths.
Along with COVID-19, the letter states these are preventable illnesses and, as such, personal responsibility would reduce their risk.
While there is some truth to this connection, our health-care system does not assign blame. All those who need medical help are treated.
One aspect of COVID sets it apart from these other health risks. Two simple injections of a vaccine greatly reduces hospitalizations. In fact, 93 per cent of COVID hospitalizations are unvaccinated individuals.
People with alcohol abuse, narcotic addiction and obesity problems are usually well aware of their increased health risks. Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions for those affected.
Personal responsibility is clearly not a sufficient cure. Anyone with experience with these problems knows that any solution is much more complicated than just exercising willpower.
I have little doubt that if alcohol abuse, narcotic addiction or obesity could be reduced by two injections as effectively as COVID-19, those affected would sign up immediately.
COVID-19 unvaccinated individuals have an opportunity that is not available to those three groups. All Covid unvaccinated individuals have to do is register, preferably today.
Steve Dove
Victoria
The needs of the many are more important
There has been much offered by many people regarding our rights and freedoms in regards to COVID-19, and many of these opinions centre on how our rights are being taken from us by supposedly authoritarian governments intent on eroding our personal “rights and freedoms.” The truth is that we don’t have anything resembling those kind of absolute rights.
When the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted four decades ago, various experts on constitutional law offered their explanations.
One person explained the new charter in a way that reduced all the confusion to an utterly simple-to-understand concept. He said that the basic intent of the charter could be explained with something that Mr. Spock famously said in the second Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the needs of the one.”
In Canada, we all have great personal rights and freedoms, most of the time. But when something that is a serious threat to all of us happens, then what is in the best interests of everyone takes precedence over the needs of any of us as individuals. And that is why “the needs of many” during this COVID crisis have outweighed “the needs of the few, or the needs of the one.”
By reducing a very complex subject to its most basic concept, this example has always done well for me.
Richard Silver
Colwood
Time to review those who sit as judges
Over the past few months, there has been much written about defunding the police, a sentiment that I do not support. However, perhaps the time has come to defund our judges.
I read with a great deal of disgust about the release of a 63-year-old man with previous serious convictions (kidnapping and sexual assault) after he attempted to break into a home in Esquimalt.
If the facts reported in the newspaper are credible, I have to ask: “What was the judge thinking?”
There are far too many stories of this kind, and time and time again the courts are demonstrating incompetence.
Judges have excellent benefits and tenure as well as extremely large paycheques. They are most likely to live in neighbourhoods where crime is a minor irritant.
The area identified in Esquimalt is not so privileged, but nonetheless, the residents have a right to sleep peacefully and feel secure in their daily lives.
The court system is expensive to run, and the public has a right to know that it has the best interests of the community in mind.
The police struggle to maintain law and order at great personal and professional risk. Often the efforts of police are not supported by the courts, where liberal and woke thinking appear to be focused on the offender rather than the victim.
It is time our community held a serious review of those that sit on the bench.
A.G. Macpherson
Victoria
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