ninme

Chris Selley’s Full Pundit in Canada’s National Post on November 4:

Your H1N1 outrage of the day
Queue-jumping! In Canada! Can you imagine?

The Calgary Herald’s Don Braid considers it “absurd” and utterly unforgivable that as Alberta’s public vaccination campaign ground to an ignominious halt, the pampered millionaires of the Calgary Flames, and their families, were being surreptitiously immunized at some no doubt incredibly swanky clinic. We’ve been saying this a lot lately, but we don’t understand how people can be so shocked about something so routine. National Hockey League players and other privileged members of society jump the queue for all manner of medical care in Canada, all the time. If Canadians want that practice ended — thereby forcing a player with, say, an injured knee, to go to the U.S. for treatment — then by all means let’s have that conversation. It would be vastly preferable to these violent bursts of indignation followed by months of stony silence.

And then today, Scott Stinson: H1N1, queue jumping, and the fallacy of universal health care:

There’s a legitimate complaint to be made about queue jumping. That is, if only people in high-risk groups are able to be vaccinated because of a tight supply, then those rules should apply to even those who play our national sport professionally and are thus treated as quasi-deities. It is a matter of principle, despite the logical counter-argument that, say, Jarome Iginla would have been hard-pressed to line up for a flu shot in Calgary without causing a mild riot. There are some practical concerns here, principle aside. …

And, of course it is particularly odd to see the outrage about H1N1 shots directed at NHL players, when they belong to a rarified group of people who get a whole level of health care that is denied the general public. If Jarome Iginla tweaks his ankle in his next game, he will have a battery of tests performed immediately. How many times have you seen a coach tell a media horde that they will know more about a player’s injury after “the MRI is done tomorrow.” Note the key word: tomorrow. I needed some work on my ankle, and it took more than a year between first appointment and final surgery. Clearly, Mr. Iginla has access to better care than I.

My point is not to say that this should not be so. A hockey team would be in rather a pickle if it couldn’t perform tests with haste — and so might be a company whose chief executive needed quick medical treatment.

But the rest of the plebs are expected to just wait that year for an MRI because nobody would be in a pickle if they had to wait a year to get their ankles fixed.

Meanwhile, apparently our Safeway got a couple vaccines, but their appointments all filled up right away. Not the clinic across the street from the Safeway, which I’ve been calling every day for two weeks, no. They haven’t even gotten updated information, not even an update to their message, “Valued patients, we haven’t been sent any and we don’t know when we’ll get any, but Safeway has ‘em across the street!”. I’m not terribly outraged by this since there’s an old folks home behind the Safeway and lots of elderly depend on that pharmacy (assuming it’s the elderly from the old folks home and not a bunch of pushy parents from three neighborhoods over), but it would be nice if real medical clinics got vaccines before the random crapshoot of grocery store pharmacies did.