A Jamaican In Exile

 https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/editorial/gov-t-must-be-decisive-for-the-common-good_232917?profile=1234 I live in Alberta, Canada where the vaccine passport is required for travel, employment, to eat in a restaurant, enter an entertainment venue, go to a gym or any other so-called ‘non-essential’ activity. So, for all intents and purposes, vaccination is mandatory here in Canada so I am fully vaccinated with three shots. Now that is out of the way, I would like to address the letter to the editor dated 7 th  October by Kenneth D Richards, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Kingston which basically says, ‘the Government must be decisive in acting for the common good’. This is code for mandating vaccination. I wish the archbishop would just come out and say so.  Would I have been fully vaccinated if it was not mandated? I am not sure. The first shot I took in a panic. While I am leaning towards the position that older people and those with comorbidities should be vaccinated, ...

 https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/editorial/gov-t-needs-to-grow-the-will-to-mandate-covid-19-vax_234117?profile=1234 Here we go again with the 'seatbelt' argument. Not wearing a seatbelt does not exclude you from travel, work, entering a restaurant or entertainment venue. One cannot compare an external safety device such as a seatbelt with injecting chemicals into your body. Such a comparison is illogical and crazy. Vaccine is mandatory where I live in Alberta, Canada. Although I was coerced into getting vaccinated before I was sure about vaccination, I am still against the mandatory Covid vaccination because it breaches the very sound medical principle of informed consent to any medical procedure and the principle of the sacredness of one's body. Governments, especially the Jamaican governments, were never so concerned with our 'safety' before. How come, all of a sudden, they are so concerned? There is another agenda. It's about the money. Each vaccine costs 3 -...

 https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/opinion/i-ve-had-it-with-the-anti-vaxxers_233532?profile=1096 Mr. Thompson's letter is so full of it that I don't know where to start so I will just go paragraph by paragraph... Anti-vaxxers did not create the current situation. The current state of affairs was created by four factors: 1. A virus that has mutated to become more infective, more severe and more deadly to younger people. 2. Government and corporate panic both of whom have reacted with overreach as exhibited by using the already overworked police to harass and arrest people for not wearing masks instead of leaving the police to focus on fighting real crime. Some companies are overreacting by firing unvaccinated workers in the name of 'Worker Safety' when in fact the vaccinated and unvaccinated are not any more dangerous to the workplace as both groups equally spread the Delta variant of the virus. In fact, asymptomatic vaccinated workers can be more dangerous than the unvacc...

https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/mandatory-vaccination-neither-right-nor-practical-says-golding_233433?profile=1373 The war on the unvaccinated continues….I am fully vaccinated, realize the value of vaccination and yet, I am against mandatory Covid vaccination. Here in Canada, according to the government agency Health Canada, up to March 2021, only 4 children under the age of 18 had died of Covid. By comparison, the Nov 1999 - Apr 2020 flu season killed 10 children and we did not close schools then or mandate flu vaccines for children without their parents’ consent.  Last weekend, for the first time, I learned of the death from Covid of someone known to me. A young person, with no known comorbidities other than being a little overweight. So, Covid is real and it can be deadly. The question is, what do we do about it? The answer seems to be vaccination – even making vaccination compulsory if necessary. Other solutions such as closing borders and lockdowns have been abandoned – g...

Sorry to rain on the vaccination parade but here is what the politicians are not telling you…  The vaccines we are using for Covid are ‘leaky’. That ‘leakiness’ means they protect most people from severe illness or death but the vaccines DO NOT PREVENT TRANSMISSION. Therefore, even the vaccinated still need to adhere to the public health protocols – including avoiding travel. Yet, because of the pressure from the travel and tourism industry, countries are busily opening their borders to vaccinated travelers without testing or quarantine requirements. That just does not make sense and will spread variants more easily. In addition, vaccinated people tend to think they are now in the clear blissfully unaware that they can still spread the virus. In fact, because the vaccinated are mostly resistant to infection, many will be asymptomatic. Being asymptomatic, not knowing they have the virus, the vaccinated will spread it in this state of blissful unawareness. A really good vaccine would...

 https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/opinion/on-reforming-the-jcf_232827?profile=1096 I refer to the column by Malik Smith 'Reforming the JCF' of 4th October 2021. As someone who was once a teen aged recruit in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) and who worked with the JCF as a civilian, I can vouch for the writer's claims. Inefficiency, corruption and brutality are rampant and normalized in the culture of the JCF. Like my time in the JCF, new recruits still report being treated terribly so the JCF remains a toxic workplace. New recruits also report to me that injustice is rampant in the JCF when the JCF itself is supposed to be an integral part of our justice system. The JCF recruits from a society where corruption and brutality are also normalized so the dilemma is how do you clean the lake when the river feeding the lake is itself polluted? The training facilities are good and other islands send their police to Jamaica for training. In my batch at training school, we had o...