We need laws to protect health-care workers from protesters

In the world’s conflict zones, reports of bombed-out hospitals and dead health workers are so common they barely make the news. In the past six years, at least 5,000 health-care providers have been attacked worldwide.

But bizarrely, the COVID-19 crisis has sparked a rash of new harassment and violence against medical workers in countries that are rated as wealthy and advanced. Here, the enemy is within.

In the U.S. this month, a pharmacist and his family members were murdered by a conspiracy theorist in revenge for administering “poisonous” vaccines. In Canada, hospitals have been under siege from angry mobs protesting vaccination and mask mandates.

Alberta, a laggard in fighting COVID-19, is now amending a law to give health-care facilities legal protection as “critical infrastructure,” Quebec is levying fines up to $12,000 on anyone who intimidates or threatens people at those sites, or incites such protests. All provinces should follow suit.

In Calgary and Edmonton, mobs of protesters turned out to hurl abuse at health workers even as COVID brought hospitals close to collapse. Thousands of Canadian health workers are so burned-out they have left their jobs.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has reported more than 600 assaults against medical workers and institutions in 40 countries in the first six months of the pandemic alone. But there are ways to mitigate this abhorrent behaviour if governments lead, rather than bow to the splinter groups with the shrillest voices.

First, there could be new federal laws to prosecute those who harass, threaten or commit violence against health workers. They are, after all, committing acts that endanger national security in ways that would quickly land political or religious extremists in jail.

Second, the anti-vax-anti-maskers who fight against those struggling to save their lives should receive war zonestyle treatment: a triage system of temporary shelters outside hospitals, equipped with cots for infected but defiantly unvaccinated patients — while the vaccinated, and those unable to take the vaccines would have the urgent care they need. The outliers would get attention if and when the overworked staff have time or opportunity.

Third, there should be a crackdown on disinformation that underlies much of the anti-vax/anti-mask campaign, spewed out from the internet, cable TV and social media. Much of it originates in the U.S. But agitators like People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier have also fuelled anti-vaccine protests.

As fall and winter chill drive Canadians indoors, protest movements are growing, including hundreds of businesses that refuse to check vaccine “passports,” ensuring that COVID-19 infections will spiral. Exhausted health workers — the walking wounded of the pandemic — will need more than platitudes to support them.