TORONTO — Toronto was on high alert Thursday, making sure that more doses of an inoculation were handed out than on any other day in the city’s history.
Hordes of visitors — almost certainly all young children — had flocked to an outdoor space across the street from the headquarters of the Toronto Star to get one of the city’s only remaining inoculations against the coronavirus, called coronavirus-19 (COVID-19).
The Toronto Health Department also held clinics across the city to vaccinate against the disease.
The surge of interest came after the Ontario government announced that it would not be making the COVID-19 shot mandatory for anyone staying in the province. The province’s former Liberal government had forced it to be a part of the post-September 11, 2001, immunization policy.
“We felt strongly that it should be mandatory, that people who are going to be around people who are vulnerable,” Windsor West MPP Lisa Gretzky, the health minister for Ontario, told CBC News. “For those who are going to be in the community, if we require the COVID-19 vaccine, we have to implement community-based surveillance to make sure that if there is an outbreak, we’re able to respond.”
Health officials believe that the spike in cases of COVID-19 came after it was featured in two feature films about Osama bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”
But anti-vaccination groups say they have been ignored by public health authorities, adding that their campaigns about the vaccine for a virus that is dangerous for very young children has also failed to make any impact.
Concerned adults have long been pushing to get the vaccine available for children under 12 who are going to be around very young infants or those who live in remote areas. At the moment, Canadian provinces have allowed adults to decide whether they want to get COVID-19 shots.
Ontario doctors this week discussed whether to officially recommend COVID-19 as a mandatory inoculation for at-risk young adults living in the province, but the meeting was postponed until after the flu season. That discussion was set to resume Friday.
In 2011, the issue of mandatory vaccines first came before Ontario’s highest court in a highly publicized case brought by an atheist who refused to be vaccinated for Hepatitis C. The court ruled that the people who believed vaccines caused terrible illnesses are not entitled to have laws implemented forcing them to have the shots.