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I promise I wasn’t planning on returning to writing about COVID-19 so soon after pivoting from our pandemic-focused newsletter.
In fact, I was already well into a newsletter — one that started with snow on a running trail in late April before reflecting on a looming river crest that makes clear this year’s flooding fears were overblown — when a report from the province’s auditor general landed in my inbox this afternoon.
The headline from that report said Manitoba effectively managed the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. You can read reporter Chris Kitching’s story about the report here.
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I had to stop. I had to read. I had to recalibrate.
But before I get to what Manitoba’s auditor general found, I want to touch on what Dr. Anthony Fauci said a few days earlier.
In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, the former face of the pandemic in the United States made clear he is still wrestling with the hard lessons of the pandemic.
“Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable,” Fauci said.
Among the things that went wrong, Fauci claimed no immunity when it came to how the country handled vaccination.
“I mean, only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly. We’re not even in the top 10. We’re way down there. And then: Why do you have red states that are unvaccinated and blue states that are vaccinated? Why do you have death rates among Republicans that are higher than death rates among Democrats and independents?”
Spoiler alert: If you were expecting a Fauci-sized dose of soul-searching and willingness to pull no punches in the Manitoba audit, you’re going to be disappointed.
However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in the work Tyson Shtykalo’s office undertook. Yes, it is a little too focused on process. And the most damning finding is the province was too reliant on using paper-based methods to collect consent and immunization data.
In any event, we never get anywhere close to learning why Manitoba’s immunization rates remain among the worst in the country.
But at least there is a recommendation the government conduct lessons-learned exercises to address gaps in emergency preparedness.
If that recommendation can be a jumping off point for some serious reflection on everything we’ve gone through since that first positive COVID case in the province was announced March 12, 2020, then we might get somewhere closer to understanding and learning.
Look, I would love nothing better than to have Dr. Brent Roussin do with the Free Press what Fauci did over the course of several hours with the NYT. I’d like to hear him reflect, share insights, make recommendations about this defining moment in the life of our province. Added bonus: This exercise would be even better if we could get any of the health ministers during that period to join the discussion.
Alas, as we have seen, now that COVID is thought of as being in the rearview mirror, we really aren’t keen on revisiting the past, right? There’s nothing to see. And apparently nothing to learn.
Fauci sees it differently. So, to a degree, does Shtykalo. What do you want to see?
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