During Lake of Bays council discussions surrounding a vaccination policy for municipal staff, Huntsville/Lake of Bays fire chief Rob Collins asked councillors to exempt firefighters from such a policy.
Collins said the fire department has made efforts to attract more volunteer firefighters to the force, which has been challenging.
“Our volunteers, for the most part, have voluntarily gotten their vaccinations. We lobbied the province early on in the pandemic to make sure that firefighters got first access when the vaccinations were first rolling out. The majority of our volunteers are vaccinated, however, I am aware of a number of them that are unvaccinated and have no intention of getting the vaccine, for various reasons,” he said.
“These are people that have been operating as normal throughout the pandemic from the beginning, even when there were no vaccines. These are people that were stepping up and getting the job done. They are operating at a higher level of personal protective equipment than typical employees are using. They are using fitted N95 masks,” Collins said, adding that in the interest of not losing any of the volunteer firefighters “I would ask council to consider an exemption under this policy for volunteer firefighters.”
His request seemed to take councillors off guard with Lake of Bays Mayor Terry Glover noting that it made him uncomfortable.
Glover asked whether the Town of Huntsville had also made such an exemption in its vaccination policy, which also involves frequent testing for those who are not vaccinated.
Collins said the same request had been made but no exemption was granted. Unvaccinated firefighters are still required to submit to regular testing in Huntsville.
“I have not been privy to the numbers in Huntsville. I have not been allowed to know how many of my firefighters here are unvaccinated. I am only aware by talking to a few of our firefighters in Lake of Bays that there are… [some] opposed to getting the vaccine here,” he said.
“I have concerns, deep concerns in this area,” responded Glover.
Councillor Bob Lacroix said he too was uncomfortable with the request because firefighters deal with many vulnerable people. He said certainly all new firefighters should be required to get vaccinated and again reiterated that he has difficulty with making an exception for volunteer firefighters.
Councillor Rick Brooks also said he’d like to see new recruits vaccinated. He said Lake of Bays has many elderly people and medical calls. “These men and women are going out to deal with people that are already in some cases compromised for other reasons so I do have an issue if they’re having direct contact with these people… the people assume that when somebody’s coming to deal with them whether it be a paramedic or a fire service person, they’re probably assuming that they’re double vaccinated.” He said he understands that getting volunteers is difficult “but our public is important too and so I’m not really in favour of doing the exemption side of it.”
Councillor George Anderson echoed those sentiments saying he’s also not comfortable with making an exception for volunteer firefighters. He said firefighters tend to be a close-knit family. “These are your brothers and sisters and you’re very, very close to these people and I don’t see us protecting those folks and then society at large if we’re doing a broad exemption,” he said, adding that he’d like more clarification regarding testing for COVID and the frequency.
Collins said predicting when a firefighter will interact with the public is difficult. Concerns were also expressed about delaying response times so that a responder can first take a test.
Further discussions took place regarding how often and when testing could take place for those who are not vaccinated.
Carrie Sykes, director of corporate services/clerk for the municipality, said staff would be working with the fire chief to figure out the logistics surrounding the testing of firefighters who are not vaccinated. Council concurred.
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If you were offered a simple, free and convenient option by your local car dealer that would guarantee you that you would have no more than one flat tire per million miles you drove, would you say yes to this offer?
How about if Hydro One sent you an offer where if you simply checked a yes box on their mail they would guarantee you no more than one, half hour power outage per decade?
Maybe, with your next cell phone, by simply agreeing, at no extra cost, to let Bell tell others that you agreed, they would guarantee that your new phone would always work or they would replace it for free within 12 hours, no matter the cause of failure, for the next 10 years?
You might get the idea…..
So when the health system offers you an option that is essentially similar for your body, why would you not want to participate?
We all have the good old, more common vaccines we took in our youth to remember. That is why you see no cases of Smallpox, virtually no Mumps, Measles and Polio today. I’m not that old but I can remember Polio.
In any population group there will always be the occasional, very rare, adverse reaction. Even if you are unlucky enough to experience this it is seldom a long lasting or fatal result.
The vastly greater percentage of people experience little to no side effects but they do get a greatly improved resistance to whatever the disease the vaccine was developed to treat.
There are a few cases where vaccines are not indicated due to special conditions and there may be a few out there who claim it is against their religion and our system has to figure a way to work with these groups.
Last thing to consider is if we want to actually get rid of this virus, we need to deny it a host in which to replicate. We can’t go out like deer hunters, find the virus one at a time and kill it by some method. We need to eliminate it’s ability to reproduce or it will always be with us. Vaccination of as high a percentage of humans, worldwide, is our best hope to do this. It may sadly be the case that this virus is now with us forever anyway but we managed to get rid of Smallpox so it is worth trying to get rid of this Covid too.
At the end of the day, I cannot understand why the problem is “vaccine resistance” when it would more logically be “vaccine demand”?
There is no provincial mandate for testing or vaccination. So drop it.!
Why have low income retail and fast food workers been able to safely work, while exposed to thousands of people daily for 600 days through the entire pandemic but public servants and politicians hide at home like cowards?
Frankly I would be more worried about the men that are vaccinated just because they could be sick and just shrug it off because they feel they are safe. With a couple of hundred fully vaccinated people testing positive every day now in Ont. the odds of getting covid -19 from them is getting more likely by the day