Higgs's 'We'll all get COVID' comment strikes a nerve
CBC
Premier Blaine Higgs has talked about "living with COVID" for months now, but he's never articulated what that concept means quite the way he did last Friday at the legislature.
Higgs literally shrugged as he predicted in a scrum with reporters that everyone in New Brunswick will probably be infected by the virus eventually.
"My jaw dropped to the floor," said Fredericton resident Jessica Bleasdale.
"I had never really quite heard him articulate it in that manner, in that it's just an expectation that we'd all get COVID. And that's an unacceptable response during a pandemic."
University of Toronto infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Colin Furness says the premier's statement represents "an abandonment" of people most at risk from severe COVID symptoms.
"I think the comment's appalling. I think it's a huge violation of the social contract."
Bleasdale has complained to the College of Physicians and Surgeons and to the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission about Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Jennifer Russell recommending the end of mask mandates in schools.
She notes that while more than 90 per cent of polio infections are asymptomatic, what society remembers now about the North American epidemic after the Second World War is those left paralyzed by the disease before a vaccine was developed.
"I'm not prepared to have my children be part of an experiment," she said.
As of last week, approximately one in every nine New Brunswickers had contracted COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
Higgs's remarks last Friday were another example of the premier's trademark candour: he often expresses his thoughts with little regard for what the political blowback might be.
But at a time when some New Brunswickers are on edge about the March 14 end of all protective measures, the comment struck a nerve.
"My first response was anger," says Elizabeth Doherty, a Fredericton university student who is immunocompromised and who has suffered severe COVID symptoms since testing positive March 11.
"I don't feel he is addressing the people most vulnerable to this virus when he says those statements. I feel like we're once again left out of that."
In an impromptu exchange with an audience member at a conference in Calgary eight months ago, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith threw cold water over the idea of industrial-sized batteries on the province's electricity grid, saying the technology was too expensive and it was "fantasy thinking" to believe it could be deployed at scale.