Month: December 2020

On Tuesday, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first patient outside of clinical trials to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, a few short days after the U.K. became the first country to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Keenan’s jab brought with it a collective sigh of relief from every corner of the world as the moment we have all impatiently awaited arrived at last.

Throughout the British Isles, the deepest sigh of relief came perhaps from Downing Street, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s political fortunes were reversed with the prick of a needle.

After nine months of a gruelling, unrelenting and frequently mismanaged battle with the pandemic, Johnson’s Conservatives have finally delivered Britons their first victory. What’s more, the start of vaccinations gave British Tories an opportunity to champion the National Health Service — the crown jewel in the welfare state their party is so often accused of wanting to dismantle.

Indeed, Johnson wasted no time in appearing at a London vaccination centre in front of the NHS logo, celebrating his country’s status as the first nation to receive the vaccine. This is a distinction he is unlikely to allow his party, his voters or his opposition in Parliament to forget anytime soon.

The victory arrives in the nick of time. This weekend sees his other priority project — Brexit — sliding toward the cliff edge with no deal in sight.

But if Johnson is the poster child for politicians riding the high of a vaccine — perhaps all the way to a general election — he is certainly not the only one.

In capitals around the world, political leaders have, with varying degrees of success, pinned their own political fortunes to the arrival and successful rollout of a vaccine. Who can blame them? After almost a year of unrelenting bad news, what politician wouldn’t want to own the solution, regardless of their limited role in it?

In the United States, President Trump has for months promised to develop a vaccine at “warp speed.” To his credit, many laughed when he said we would have a vaccine by the holidays

This week, Trump was elated to emerge from his self-imposed confinement in the White House to posture in front of his “Operation Warp Speed” signs. While he celebrated his incredible, fantastic, amazing efforts to bring a vaccine to American shores —single-handedly, it seems — he stunningly ignored the news that the total number of infected Americans passed 15 million.

The video introducing the event was an opportunity for Trump and his team to manipulate and decontextualize the words of vaccine timeline skeptics, like Dr. Fauci. In mocking his naysayers among the country’s top public health officials, the president managed to further undermine respect and trust in the very people responsible for rolling out a vaccine in the coming months.

Unsurprisingly, the people at Pfizer and Moderna — who we actually have to thank for the vaccine — declined the invitation to join Trump’s grotesque performance, which inevitably declined into bellyaching about the election that was stolen from him.

Befitting the spoiled brat he has proven to be, the president was unable for even an hour to recognize the struggles or celebrate the achievements of anyone but himself. So it goes.

If Johnson’s vaccine politicking constituted a shot across his opponents’ bow, Trump’s was a volley of cannons straight at their hull.

At home, it remains to be seen how our own political leaders will fare in their vaccine politics. Thus far, Trudeau and his cabinet seem reluctant to tie their fortunes to the successful rollout of a vaccine, except to say that every Canadian will be inoculated in due course.

After a confusing and rocky start, the Liberals seemed to get their sea legs this week with the news that Canada will become the third nation to begin inoculating its citizens. But the hard work of securing more doses and rolling them out has only just begun.

With a potential election looming just around the corner, Trudeau had better hope that his team sticks the landing — because there is no inoculation that can keep a minority government alive forever.

Amid all the bluster of Donald Trump’s persistent, pathetic and frankly anticlimactic simulacrum of a power grab, it is easy to forget just how much is at stake.

For weeks, we’ve seen the president and his attorneys wheel out their sock puppets to show-and-tell the nation their conspiracy theories of election fraud — with all the rhetorical and legal prowess of a fourth-grade holiday pageant. Even though they have been tossed out of court after court, the freakish tragicomedy of it all is causing real, lasting damage.

What’s more, unlike the damage Trump has wrought on some of America’s more resilient institutions (the courts, the Justice Department, the intelligence community), this farce strikes at the heart of an already weakened facet of public life: faith in democracy.

At a time when so many Americans feel either disillusioned or entirely removed from the process by which their leaders are chosen, the president’s campaign has further undermined the most sacred aspect of secular life.

Every few years, in democracies around the world, citizens of every walk of life journey to community centres, places of worship and schools to participate in a ritual that binds us all. In doing so, they pay testament to their belief in the promise of modern democracy. They believe that their votes, cast in those musty halls and church basements, will be counted fairly, without fear or favour — and that our leaders will accept the result.

That promise is an article of faith. The very bedrock of our democracy.

Yes, many Americans have changed the channel on Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s noxious lies. But as they spin malignant fables about Dominion Voting Systems and a conspiracy among Georgia Republicans, remember: voters are watching. America is watching. Perhaps worst of all, the world is watching

First, voters. Prior to the 2020 election, which saw nearly unprecedented voting figures, the U.S. had fallen behind most developed democracies in voter turnout. This trend has been driven by a number of factors, not least of which being the determined efforts of state legislatures to disenfranchise and disillusion certain voting populations — especially in urban districts and among Black Americans.

This reality is troubling in itself, but it also points to an incredibly fragile democracy which is further imperiled by Trump’s efforts to convince Democrats and Republicans alike that the election game — like so many others in his alternate reality of America — is rigged against them.

Second, the nation as a whole. As the U.S. enters a year that could present even greater challenges and cause for division than 2020, it needs resolute leadership and a federal government that can genuinely work to unite Americans. That will be no easy task for Joe Biden’s administration, but it will be made even harder by the implications of Trump’s fraudulent claims of a “stolen” election.

Recent polling shows that upwards of 70 per cent of those people who voted for Donald Trump genuinely believe that Biden’s win is illegitimate; that the election was, indeed, stolen from Trump. If that’s the case, Biden’s aims of unity and reconciliation are dead even before he raises his hand and takes his oath of office. Those voters will simply never accept him as their president. It will be Obama redux, with the result being even less appetite for bipartisanship and even less getting done in Washington.

Finally, the rest of the world.

It will take years to mend the damage Trump has done to international relationships, global co-operation and general comity among allies.

Since Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, U.S. diplomatic strength has relied on a sense of exceptionalism rooted in the morality and stability of American democracy. Now that the president’s actions are more befitting a Kim than a Kennedy, it will be that much harder for the State department to scold Russia, Iran or the many despots whose actions it routinely condemns in the UN. “Look,” they will say, “you’re just like us.”

In the end, we can take comfort in the fact that Trump’s efforts will fail. But we cannot lose sight of the very real damage he will have inflicted — and the work it will take to clean up his mess.