Wednesday November 8, 2023 | VICTORIA, BC
Political analysis by Mary P Brooke, B.Sc. | Island Social Trends | COVID ARCHIVE
NEXT COVID UPDATE ON NOVEMBER 10, 2023
A tense exchange in BC Legislative Assembly this afternoon started with BC Conservative House Leader Bruce Banman lobbing a remark over to BC Minister of Health Adrian Dix, saying Provincial Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry should be fired for how she handled the COVID pandemic, including ‘cajoling’ people into getting vaccinated.
Banman said that British Columbians were “sucked into a world full of chaos caused by constantly changing rules, brutal restrictions on people’s personal freedoms, and a heavy handed approach that especially failed the most vulnerable British Columbians”.
In some ways, raising the topic of COVID immunization and Dr Bonnie Henry specifically seemed like from another time now past. The peak phase of worry about COVID is well behind most people now; going to a COVID immunization clinic (now combined with influenza vaccination options) seems like an everyday thing.
Health-care worker impact:
Banman said: “British Columbia stands alone against all evidence as one of the only jurisdictions in the world to ban health-care workers who choose not to take the jab, because of ideological agenda of this extreme leftist NDP government and their un-elected bureaucrats.”
Currently in BC, health-care workers must be vaccinated to work with the public, which the BC government feels is appropriate as part of ensuring best care in the public health-care system. This has particularly impacted the home-care worker scenario, where the province feels fully justified to protect people (mostly seniors) in their homes when a staff person enters to provide a service.
The COVID public health challenge is now endemic, something we all live with across the world, but is considered containable due to vaccination. The current Omicron strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is BA.2.86 which shows the expected continued mutation of the virus; vaccines rolling out this fall are targeted to the latest strain.
However, the BC Conservative view on that is: “In the midst of a health care staffing crisis, Dr Bonnie Henry and this NDP government have banned thousands of health care workers from working in BC’s hospitals, clinics, doctor’s offices and ER’s”.
The big question:
Banman’s question to the Premier in today’s BC afternoon Question Period: “Will he fire Dr Bonnie Henry and hire back the thousands of health-care workers who were wrongly kicked to the curb?”
Dr Henry has been BC’s Provincial Health Officer since 2018. As BC’s most senior public health official, she is responsible for monitoring the health of all British Columbians and undertaking measures for disease prevention and control and health protection. Dr. Henry has led the province’s response on the COVID-19 pandemic and the drug overdose emergency.
Minister of Health response:
Health Minister Adrian Dix was clearly furious at the challenge to fire Dr Henry, but kept his cool. “People in BC know that we as a province — not the government — led the world in our response to COVID-19. We did so, because we respected science. We respected our public health leaders. And we had an outstanding public health leader, Dr Bonnie Henry.”
“There are jurisdictions that have intervened to fire the provincial health officer. We are proud of ours, we support ours, and we’re going to continue to do so,” said Dix, who was clearly a fan of Dr Henry’s pandemic management from day one in early 2020.
Dr Henry had been a specialist in pandemic study before the SARS-CoV-2 virus (aka COVID-19) ever hit. In her philosophy pre-COVID she was against mass shut-down orders; during COVID-19 what may have seemed like ‘changes’ and ‘flip-flops’ was, in part, a way to keep as much flexibility in the situation as possible. She never did fully close schools (at first they were open to low-income and special needs children whose parents with front-line jobs had to go to work, then opened within a range of restrictions and guidelines).
Dix defended that the COVID immunization program did take care of the most vulnerable, referring mostly to seniors and the elderly in care homes. That was the prevailing science, but did not take into account the social and economic realities of working-age adults and their families as perhaps being an equal if not more important priority for maintaining society and economy at a time when it was unknown how the pandemic would fully impact the population (in terms of death or permanent disability).
The long-term effects of social isolation for extended periods of time are only now really beginning to emerge. Similarly, impacts on small businesses were in many cases significant, with spillover impacts still emerging for businesses and their owners.
Not against vaccination:
“This is not about opposing the jab,” said Banman, who said that as a former medical professional (chiropractor) that he is personally fully vaccinated.
“It is about ending the medical tyranny of this NDP government and Dr Bonnie Henry, and not cajoling and not coercing and not deflecting,” he said in the House today.
“Dr Bonnie Henry used the term ‘cajole’ to describe the vaccination uptake plan that she and the BC NDP had cooked up together,” said Banman. He quoted a definition of ‘cajole’ from the Cambridge Dictionary: “To persuade someone to do something they might not want to do by pleasant talk and sometimes false promises”.
Airborne:
Ironically, the BC government is tacitly admitting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus (aka COVID-19) might be airborne, in that the fullest possible protection through immunization is still sought (as in requiring health-care workers to be vaccinated).
The Provincial Health Officer has never quite declared the virus as airborne. Early in the pandemic that idea was entirely scoffed at, saying the droplets were too heavy to be carried in the air. However, social distancing was part of the pandemic response in BC, and ventilation improvements have followed in the years since first-onset of the pandemic (now endemic), to help take care of possible transmission of the virus.
Election thread:
Addressing his question to the Premier: “Will you want to fire Dr Henry or do you want to wait for the working class, everyday British Columbians to elect a Conservative government and fire you all?”
BC Conservative Leader John Rustad and House Leader Banman have been using their privilege as the fourth official party to bring forward questions in the Legislative Assembly that will serve their interests in the next provincial election, which is currently scheduled for October 19, 2024.
Comments:
Local MLA Ravi Parmar (Langford-Juan de Fuca) posted in social media afterward: “Grateful for the strong support in the legislature today for Dr. Bonnie Henry in the face of baseless attacks by the Conservatives. Disheartening that the BC United, and Greens remained silent.”
A regular supporter of NDP policies on X (Twitter) posted: “What a disgusting comment to make..appealing to anti vax idiots knowing full well the threats of violence to Dr Henry! Despicable!”
===== RELATED:
- Next respiratory season update on November 10, 2023 (November 9, 2023)
- BC Green deputy leader Gandhi has resigned over comment about Dr Henry (November 8, 2023)
- COVID News: BA.2.86 variant detected in BC, first in Canada (September 2, 2023)
- Long-COVID treatment continues in BC (April 22, 2023)
- Dr Bonnie Henry marks 3 years into the COVID pandemic (March 10, 2023)
===== ABOUT THE WRITER:
Island Social Trends Editor Mary P Brooke has a B.Sc. in health science (food and nutrition) and a second major in sociology. She reported daily on the COVID pandemic during 2020 into 2022.
Mary Brooke was the first (only) journalist to challenge the roll-out priorities of the COVID-19 immunization campaign, the first to ask about MIS-C (inflammatory response in children), and also the first to ask about what became to be known as long-COVID.
Archive of COVID news articles and editorials (2020 to present): COVID-19 ARCHIVE
Ms Brooke reports with the BC Legislative Press Gallery, sometimes remotely due to running her own publishing business based in the west shore. The print edition of Island Social Trends will be launched in January 2024.
Mary Brooke was nominated this year for a Jack Webster Foundation award for being a woman journalist serving her community through journalism.