Poilievre wants to make it illegal to have mandated vaccinations as a condition of employment and travel. He introduced the bill last June, and a second reading in the house is currently in progress. (FYI - It has to pass through
three readings in the house, then three in the senate before it reaches royal assent, so it's got a long ways to go,
and private members bills often don't get through the process.) You can read what different MPs have said about it at the excellent website,
Open Parliament.
But just think about it a minute: imagine going to a country with a dengue fever outbreak, as is happening now in several countries, and you don't have to be immunized for it. That's just nuts!
Bill Comeau, math prof at UW, said of Poilievre's tweet about the bill,
"As a mathematician and a follower of science, this was one of the scariest posts I have ever seen from a modern politician. The potential for exponential spread from a new future pandemic is very real. This scale of anti-science denial could potentially harm millions. . . . This bill would appear to also erase existing vaccine mandates, such as the ones that protect modern school children from a host of serious diseases."
We are moving so far backwards with this party, and too many people are climbing aboard. It's just following the Republican talking points to the letter.
In Florida, the governor recently backed up the surgeon general in "urging residents against new Covid vaccines." They're trying to make people worried because the vaccine wasn't tested on people, but on non-human primates. But, that doesn't mean they're not safe! Very similar versions of the vaccine have been tested on people and used on people with very few ill effects. If you didn't react poorly to the former versions, then you won't to this one either.
His other main talking point is that "Pharma will make more money if this thing is approved and they start pushing it on everybody." It's a familiar narrative, and does what
most effective spin does: it takes a grain of truth, an authentic worry on people's minds, and generalizes it large enough so it's all encompassing and also no longer even
close to the truth. Yes, Big Pharma has allowed some drug through, like oxycontin, that ended up harming some people while making others rich. But the pharmaceutical industry is massive. Most of the drugs that have been tested and used by people
saved their lives. Vaccines, in particular, have saved lives. Did people make money doing the work of producing them? Absolutely. We can't all be
Jonas Salk. People also make money building new hospitals, but that doesn't make it a
bad thing.
Here's a 85 second video to explain how these vaccines work from Drew Comments: