LETTER – We need to stop taking sides on COVID-19 vaccinations
(Image: Mel Rothenburger)
We need to move forward and show compassion. Instead your recent article (‘What to do about businesses that won’t use the card’) on how to fine those who do not comply with vaccine passports, is keeping the anger and controversy going.
People are trying to wrap their minds around all the changes we have encountered these last two years and it is going to take time and patience and caring and understanding and gentleness.
Life as we know it changed the day the world shut down for COVID 19! The whole world! Something we have never seen before! And life has not returned to what we would call normal since and now we must adjust to a new normal.
Are we helping people adjust? No we are not! Instead we are taking sides and being forceful! We are exposing those who are afraid of getting the vaccine and bullying them instead of making a safe environment for them to express their concerns and come to a place where they are able to change their minds and get vaccinated.
Anti vaccine people are actually Anti government and they are a small group. There are people out there who have reacted to vaccines In the past or who have had Anaphylactic reactions to different things and those people are afraid of what the vaccine is made up of! We have lumped these people into the same group as Anti vaccine people. Is that fair?
We need to move forward!!! We have to stop with all the negativity and anger and fear! Do people not see if we don’t stop taking sides and start pulling together we will move to a place where anger and fear will take someone’s life not COVID.
You are someone in our community who could spread a message of a very different kind and we need a different message! Will you stand up and be that person?
DARLENE HEGYL
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Now that we seem to depend on facebook and other such social sites allowing those who would normally be a small but silent group of fearful but disorganized folk to be joined by everybody who wants to change society for an infinite number of valid and invalid reasons, our society has become a reservoir of tub-thumping discontents strongly reminiscent of the Trump bunch to the south. What is next, an invasion of parliamentary headquarters? And that’s not an invite to rebellion; it’s in invitation for some thoughtfulness about whether we really want to continue that route to anarchy.
It’s about managing relatively limited health care resources against an increasing number of COVID-19 cases and time is the essence. I don’t think society can afford to buy any more time to try to dissuade reluctant anti-vaccine regardless of their beliefs. The message of a different kind? If you are not vaccinated you cannot participate in collective events for obvious reasons. I see nothing wrong with that message.