‘There’s a lot of distrust with regards to the motivation of those people that are refusing to get vaccinated and out there protesting and claiming it’s a rights issue’
CALGARY – Canadians are increasingly divided over COVID-19 vaccination status, according to a new poll that shows most vaccinated people do not trust their unvaccinated friends and neighbours and believe they are lying about medical exemptions.
“There’s a lot of distrust with regards to the motivation of those people that are refusing to get vaccinated and out there protesting and claiming it’s a rights issue,” said Jack Jedwab, president and CEO of the Association of Canadian Studies and Metropolis Canada (ACS), who shared the findings of an ACS-Leger poll exclusively with the National Post.
The poll found that nearly seven in 10 respondents, 69 per cent, said they do not trust people that are unvaccinated. British Columbians were the most likely, at 82 per cent of respondents, to say they did not trust unvaccinated people, followed by Ontario, where 73 per cent of respondents said they did not trust people that were unvaccinated.
Respondents in Alberta and Quebec were most likely to say they trusted unvaccinated people, at 54 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively.
“There is a problem of cohesion. We’re not on the same page. As the percentage of people who are unvaccinated diminished, I think the tension increased rather than decreased,” Jedwab said, noting that vaccine hesitancy was higher, closer to 40 per cent across the population, earlier in the pandemic.
Now, over 76 per cent of Canada’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 71 per cent of the population, 27 million people, are fully vaccinated, according to Statistics Canada. Among the eligible population, people 12 years old and up, 81 per cent of the country is fully vaccinated.
“As that group (of unvaccinated people) became smaller, I think the tension began ratcheting up and the mistrust has really escalated,” Jedwab said, adding
Jedwab said he believes the deepening divisions pose a challenge for government outreach as health authorities across the country try to convince an increasingly entrenched minority to get a COVID-19 shot. At the same time, vaccine hesitancy poses an additional problem for governments implementing vaccine mandates for their workers.
The federal government has given an end-of-October deadline for public servants to get vaccinated, show proof of a legitimate exemption for vaccination or risk disciplinary action. Provincial governments have also proposed vaccine mandates and, in Quebec’s case, have had to extend the deadlines for implementing those mandates or risk potential impacts in the labour pool.
“I think this is a very critical issue going forward because we’re trying to figure out what’s underlying the concerns or rationale for people who resist getting vaccinated,” Jedwab said, noting that divisions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people are deepening.
The ACS-Leger poll, conducted between Oct. 8 and Oct. 10 of 1,541 Canadians, also found that seven in 10 respondents, 74 per cent, believe there are legitimate medical exemptions to getting vaccinated, but most people could not pinpoint exactly what constituted a medical exemption.
Over 48 per cent of respondents believed that an allergy to vaccine ingredients provided a legitimate medical exemption to getting a COVID-19 vaccine, 10 per cent believed a chronic health problem was a legitimate medical excuse and roughly 9 per cent believed a compromised immune system allowed for a medical exemption.
In fact, the list of legitimate medical exemptions in most Canadian provinces is quite small, and exemptions are granted on a very narrow set of requirements.
In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, exemptions are granted for pre-existing conditions if a person has either a “severe allergic reaction or anaphylaxis to a component of a COVID-19 vaccine” or “myocarditis to initiating a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine series.”
People with a history of capillary leak syndrome, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, heparin-induced thrombocytopenia or arterial thrombosis can also get an exemption to taking the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Allergies also require specific proof of a reaction, including a note from an allergist in many provinces.
In Alberta, which has the second lowest vaccination rate in the country after Saskatchewan, anyone who had an anaphylactic reaction to a first does of a COVID-19 and “has been assessed by an allergist/immunologist, and future doses of any COVID-19 vaccine are contraindicated,” may be eligible for an exemption.
The province does not give COVID-19 vaccination exemptions on religious or philosophical grounds.
Notably, the ACS-Leger poll found that eight in 10 Canadians, 79 per cent of respondents, don’t believe there are legitimate religious exemptions for not getting vaccinated.
Article From: National Post
Author: Geoffrey Morgan
