This letter is in response to the Feb. 3rd letter entitled, ” What do you believe?” and all the other letters pertaining to our so-called loss of freedom.
You have missed the boat. We all believe in and crave our freedoms, and like Neil Young’s music legacy, we all want to rock in a free world. But yet he removed his music from Spotify, because Spotify was promoting celebrity individuals who were spreading false anti-vaccination information regarding COVID.
It is very simple. Your idea of freedom stops when another person’s freedom begins. Freedom does not come at the expense of someone else’s freedom.
The freedom that you want unfortunately kills people, puts a tremendous burden on our health care workers, hurts our economy, disrupts lives, and prolongs the inconvenience of wearing a mask.
A CBC radio report on Feb. 7 featured the head of the BC Cancer Foundation who reported that there were 23 per cent fewer cancer surgeries in 2020. In some Winnipeg hospitals it was as high as 40 per cent less. Why? The answer is quite obvious. There were many cancer patients who suffered undo and unknowable consequences. Where were their freedoms?
Selfishness is not a necessary prerequisite to obtaining freedom.
It is true that vaccinated people make up the majority (69 per cent of hospitalizations in BC) these days. Many people have taken this to mean that the vaccines don’t work. But that is the wrong interpretation. They clearly do. The statistics and raw numbers are misleading. They fail to account for two important factors: the size of the vaccinated population and the age of that population. Because vaccination rates are lower in younger children, and because younger individuals are less likely to require hospitalization, you must also adjust for age to get an accurate sense of hospitalization rates and the protective benefits of the vaccines.
The bottom line is that the data confirms that unvaccinated people are 7.1 times, (710 per cent) more likely to be hospitalized and 13.8 times more likely to be in intensive care.
Regardless of what the brainwashing, radicalization, and desensitization has led you to believe, vaccinations provide very good protection against severe infection and hospitalization and have given thousands of people their true freedom. Were no vaccines available, we would not be talking about thousands of people in the hospital, but tens of thousands, putting an overwhelming stress on our health care system and causing more health workers to leave the profession.
It took two years, but thank you scientific world for having given me one of your most cherished freedoms.
Claude Germain
Valemount, BC
