Not satisfied with tyrannizing their own staff, several Canadian hospitals are moving to bar unvaccinated visitors from seeing their sick and dying loved ones in hospitals.
“I think of all the places that we need to show proof of vaccinations, this is one of them,” explained Elizabeth Bardon, COVID incident commander at Kingston Health Sciences Centre, while speaking to CTV News.
“People who come to [the] hospital are not coming by choice, they are very ill, and right now, our patients are sicker than they’ve ever been… we have a special duty of care to make sure that they don’t get infected with something else while they’re here.”
On October 22, Kingston Health Sciences Centre will require proof of vaccination merely to enter the hospital and see family. Several other hospitals are also falling in line, including Toronto’s University Health Network and those in Quebec.
Meanwhile, the BC government plans on expanding the restrictions applied to long-term care homes to their hospitals, ensuring the sick die alone, with only faceless hospital staff to comfort them.
“I have to admit from an ethical and human perspective this is potentially the hardest context in which we are requiring vaccine proof because when are we more vulnerable when a loved one is in the hospital? When else do we have the incentive or desperate need to be there for a loved one,” said Vardit Ravitsky, professor of bioethics at the University of Montreal.
“We need to keep in mind how sensitive this requirement is because it touches on families at their most difficult moments, in their most vulnerable situations.”
While Ravitsky says this is an extreme measure that will indefinitely cause much grief, she believes that the risks outweigh any such concern — the ends justify the means.
“Even if it only lasts a few weeks or months, we have to be aware of the human need and tragic nature of some situations and create enough space for nuance in the way that we implement this idea,” said Ravitsky.
Other guardians of the moral high ground have also weighed in, of course agreeing that barring the unvaccinated from comforting their loved ones is justified to slow the spread or whatever.
This decision comes less than two weeks after hospitals began preventing organ recipients from receiving their transplants, and now many are wondering how long it will be before Canada outright bans all unvaccinated Canadians from medical care.
