Crawford Kilian –
Public health has disintegrated into “personal responsibility,” though public health officials continue to be paid good salaries. Doctors, nurses and other health-care workers are catching COVID-19 or just quitting, leaving hospitals and clinics understaffed. Some of us are lucky to have family doctors, even if it takes weeks to arrange a face-to-face 10-minute interview. Pierre Poilievre has reportedly signed up 300,000 new members of the Conservative Party of Canada, largely on the promise of doing away with all vaccine mandates.
From the start of the pandemic, writer and researcher Jon Parsons [COVID-19 and Ethics in Canada: The Failure of Common Decency HCE Press (2022)]tracked our response to it — not just the numbers of cases and vaccinations, but our ethical responses.
Our responses to the pandemic fall, he argues, into three categories: passive nihilism, active nihilism and ethical subjects.
