Canada’s numbers show the vaccines don’t stop disease spread, don’t deliver normal life.

We have choices. Turn off the television. Be a loving human being.

Politicians and public health officials placed all their eggs in one basket. Vaccines, they said, were the answer. The way out of our nightmare.

Those people were wrong. 67 million doses of vaccine have been administered here in Canada. Rather than beating the disease into submission, rather than reducing it to small, isolated pockets, we instead ended up with more than twice the infections the second year of the pandemic, compared to the first.

At the end of 2020, our total infections stood at 581k.

COVID-19 vaccines began being administered here in Canada on December 14, 2020. According to a news story, it was an “historic moment” – a “first step forward into the light.” We were witnessing the “beginning of the end of this awful illness.” Canada was “charting its path forward towards recovery.”

But even though we vaccinated like mad all the way through 2021, Canadians experienced a further 1.5 million infections. (The total, as of yesterday, was 2.1 million. Minus last year’s 581k, that’s 1.5 million additional 2021 cases – 2.6 times as many as in 2020.)

Here’s another way of looking at things. A year ago, on January 3, 2021, Canada set a new record – 11.4k infections were reported on that day. On April 3rd, 2021, we again recorded more than 11k new infections.

Where are we now? We’ve just blown those one-day records out of the water:

• Dec. 22: 15k
• Dec. 23: 22k
• Dec. 24: 24k
• Dec. 25: 24k
• Dec. 26: 21k
• Dec. 27: 21k
• Dec. 28: 22k

Many of the experts making decisions about our daily lives are out of their depth. As 2021 ends and a new year begins, they have an opportunity to exhibit some humility. But don’t hold your breath.

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The 90-second video at the top of this post reminds us of something important. We each have the power to choose.

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