We had an election in the middle of ours that complicated things quite a bit didn't it it certainly complicated things i think i think there were problems on both parties in terms of the approach to this but you know even before the election people were releasing uh restrictions before the population was protected and the key for these restrictions was they were really a temporizing measure until there was a definitive way to protect people like a vaccine or an antiviral drug and unfortunately we weren't able to wait long enough to get enough people vaccinated that the population was really protected,
As i mentioned at the top of the program there is something very much it seems in the canadian character uh about uh being compliant and following the rules and yet we also saw that we were arriving i guess at sort of the breaking point for a lot of folks in canada over these restrictions uh i maybe things have timed out pretty well here that we're starting to see omicron subside uh could canada have gone on with its same level of compliance if if it had gone past this or needed to go much past this point well you know first of all i think you raised a very important point,
Which is that um eighty percent or so the part of the population wanted vaccines so when there were vaccines that were made available in fact at the beginning we even had a rationing of supplies there was you know sort of a very strategic approach to rolling out the vaccines targeting and providing it to the most vulnerable which was at time the elderly and then slowly rolling them out to different patient populations based on certain risk factors notably age and at that point people were getting the vaccines they bought into the two dose concept eventually people also bought into the three or four though concept that they were immunocompromised,
But the issue of course is that this this pandemic has stretched out too long it has come with science that has uh you know come at breakneck speed which may go over the head of a lot of the general public and as a result of that science there have been changes in policies even changes in the number of doses required and the timing of the doses and the problem is that that pandemic fatigue was a perfect nest for the convoys and the other protests that people were starting to sort of manifest a minority voice but they were manifesting and that's what you've seen recently,
He does it boil down then if we could get rid of we had all these arguments of course over masks and over social distancing what places should be open closed things like that if we had just been as willing to adopt and adapt to the vaccine as canada was what difference would that have made you think well i think it would have helped tremendously but yeah we made mistakes even before then we weren't consistent what we're telling people people can do one thing very easily so i think if we just told them to avoid crowds and to wear a mask they might have done that but we're giving them information about you know washing down surfaces with bleach about bleaching even their groceries when they came home and and people really got confused even the government initially suggested we didn't need to mask,
So in fact there was an connotation of skepticism by the period we grew the vaccines were improperly promoted as a way to fumigate the people then trust that if you know they could never they would never get infected if they got the vaccine and that was never the point of the vaccine so in fact when they started seeing these so-called breakthrough infections which were infrequent and usually very mild they lost faith in the vaccine so i think initially there was a great impetus to get vaccinated but we actually undermined our own desire to get vaccinated with the message that was being given well that's a pretty good uh encapsulation perhaps of a mistake made on our side of the border dr vin uh if canada had it all to do over again do you think there were there mistakes made in the canadian approach that you would change from here,
If it happens again and we kind of have to doubt that this might be our last go around with a pandemic right well all the issues that dr baker just raised actually were also points that arrived here people there was this this overselling of the impact of the vaccines uh there was this mixed messaging by government uh you know public health policy or or agencies so all of that happened here the issue however is that it didn't happen in such a polarized fashion at least not in the first you know two years or so and it also wasn't one or the other so it wasn't that we did vaccines or masking we had indoor masking in fact even eventually upgrading to better types of masks for indoor spaces,
You know at a much longer period of time than the united states as we were responsibility the extra stuffs like the progressing out of the vaccines and all the other actions so i think what occurred for us is that we were maybe slow to come out of the starting gates but we had a lot of layered approaches we weren't perfect trust me and our governments are both at the provincial and federal level are actually sort of uh you know perhaps to some of us abandoning ship a little bit too early and there's some concerns on that end but i think up until now we've been able to use multiple layers through vaccinations and other public health risks you know restriction of social activities to be able to keep things somewhat under control dr baker i've only got a couple seconds left if we if something were like this were to happen again in the u.s have we been able to learn any lessons.
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