Monkeypox? Please, not another virus

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/05/2022 (1588 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This was supposed to be the year of breakthroughs in health-care financing and reform. But with only a few parliamentary sitting days left before governments across Canada begin to take the summer off, we’re almost halfway through the year and no progress.

Everyone pledged the lessons learned from our very shaky anti-COVID campaign — the revelation of how underfunded, understaffed and inefficient our health-case systems are — meant this time, we really were going to make the big changes needed.

B.C. Premier John Horgan, chair of the provinces-and-territories club the Council of the Federation, had marshalled by last fall a series of promising breakthroughs on health-care reform with most club members. Ottawa has slow-walked the discussions since. As one frustrated senior provincial official exclaimed, “Why would a Liberal prime minister not want to have as part of his legacy the first breakthrough in health care in a generation, for Pete’s sake?” Indeed.

But the most severe wake-up call we’ve had over these brutal pandemic years has been how shaky is our public health system. The list of the collective failures would fill an entire page of this newspaper. The top four might be terrible communications, inconsistency and contradiction, duelling governments, and a lack of transparency. This could be widening the serious trust gap, as revealed by the annual Edelman Trust Barometer.

Now we have another terrifying virus. Even its name inspires dread: “monkeypox.” We know how close genetically we are to monkeys — a lot closer than bats! Any virus with “pox” in its name brings back memories of all the terrifying poxes that have plagued humanity. We had declared smallpox — monkeypox’s close cousin — exterminated. Now we wonder.

The new virus is partly associated, so far, with men who have sex with other men, reviving memories of another nightmare — HIV/AIDS. Not only in its killing potential, but the possible rise in stigma and shame once more. Some on the right are sure soon to revive the old hatreds for partisan gain, just as Reagan-era Republicans and others did a generation ago.

We share both a horror at this new enemy, but also a deep weariness about virus-fighting overall. Every time we approach the finish line, the goalposts get moved. How prepared are we now, after all our bitterly earned experience? Apparently, not very. The same opaque and changing communications from public health officials; the same tug of war about access to vaccines. Skeptical citizens wonder if “those guys really know what the hell they are doing,” as one friend said.

Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam and her deputy Dr. Howard Ngoo may be great epidemiologists, but great communicators they will never be. They either need a persuasive Anthony Fauci-like spokesperson, or perhaps it’s time for them to hand on the baton. Public health has no exclusive minister in any Canadian government. Why? Health Canada and its provincial cousins have ignored, dismissed and treated it as a secondary health-care issue for decades.

There are national forums on many subsets of health-care issues, but not on public health. Why not? At the most basic level, most governments are ignorant of science itself. Ottawa briefly had an effective science minister a few years ago, Kirsty Duncan. The bureaucracy did in her and her ministry; few even noticed.

We were humiliated by the warehouses of rotting protective gloves and gowns in this pandemic. I wonder who will ensure that never happens again — that supplies are maintained and available for immediate sharing. Certainly no minister’s head will roll after the next scandal; only a mid-level bureaucrat may take the fall.

In public health systems and health care overall, real-time data sharing is still a pipe dream. How in God’s name can one urgently roll out best practices and important discoveries, if access to the data is buried in an annual report months later? A cliche loved by cynical Japanese people is: “We never learn from experience, we only learn from catastrophe.” We’ve had our catastrophe — let’s start applying its lessons.

Robin V. Sears was an NDP strategist for 20 years and later served as a communications adviser to businesses and governments on three continents. He is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robinvsears