In his “Readers Write” letters (Progress, April 8, 2022), Darrell Johnson suggests, as some other Canadians have tried to suggest, that their bodily autonomy was taken away.
Clearly, no one in Canada was forced to take “the jab” as they like to derogatorily call it. Yes, we decided as a country to make it mandatory for many employment positions. Most of us had no problem with this, because it was a decision made with everyone’s health in mind.
I believe his error of thinking starts with the thought that the virus was “highly survivable if one even gets it.”
History has already shown that the virus was not survivable for many people, and a great many more were not only quite sick, but developed long term problems from having had the virus.
We do not know how effective our various efforts to limit the virus actually have been, although many studies and statistics do show that our efforts, and especially the vaccines when they became available, were very effective in keeping the overall effects of the virus to a much lower, acceptable level.
My personal experience, like most others, was to think of others and do my part to keep us all safer, using the medical and scientific knowledge we had available.
It was, and still is, a learning curve in how humanity can deal with such viruses.
Sadly my sister and her husband chose not to use the vaccine last fall, and after more than two months each on a ventilator, my brother-in-law was let go. My sister is slowly recovering, but will forever bear the severe scars of the virus, and the knowledge that her husband would have likely, (90 per cent at the time of the Delta variant) survived, had they taken the available vaccines.
Clarence Wiens
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