Newfoundland Paper Publishes Unhinged And Bigoted Article About Unvaccinated Canadians

I like The Shoreline news publication for the fact that it is a small paper that covers very localized issues for where I live in Newfoundland. It is great to get to read a little bit of news from almost every community. 

Reading through it this morning, however, left me shocked and appalled that such a quaint little paper would publish such an ignorant tirade. “The Anti-Vaxxers have crossed a line; rein them in” in big bold print. The author, Mr. Craig Westcott, opens with how he arrived at his local booster clinic on Saturday, 8 January 2022, to find it more or less empty, reporting success in getting his shot.

After congratulating himself and the clinic staff Mr. Wescott’s mask begins to slip, he gives a swift rundown of his gripe with social media and how they’ve gotten more “resources” (code for money) during the pandemic than “traditional” media like paper, television or radio. This, however, is not the meat of the article as made clear by his headline. He immediately gets down and dirty by slinging mud at a minority of people with legitimate concerns over the “vaccinations” and labels them “Anti-vaxxers.” A term coined in the past to label those who think regular vaccinations cause disorders such as autism. Equating those of us who have questions and hesitancy over such recently developed technology as mRNA therapy to that aforementioned group of the past. 

Wescott cites a small story from later that same Saturday of the clinic being host to a half dozen or so anti-mandate/ anti-vax protesters, causing the clinic to allegedly close down at 3 pm that day and how some went without getting their government-mandated medical treatment for the evening. From here he springboards into an all-out tirade against those he personally views to be the problem with society; the “Anti-Vaxxers.” His self-righteousness in claiming that people are “jawing” others for their masks in public before going on to assert “They’re going to jaw the wrong person soon and there will be violence” while he is writing this article is absurd.

Westcott doesn’t stop there though, he keeps going, trying to incite a reaction from his audience by incessantly calling those awful “anti-vaxxers” mean names such as “ninnies” and “dumb-dumbs”. Blaming those of us who have reservations on how the authorities have responded to this pandemic, to only prolonging it and causing further mutations and outbreaks of the virus. In no uncertain terms, he blames us.

The final part of his prolonged diatribe is his many prescriptions as to how we as a society should treat Canadians who do not comply. Lock us out of society, no Church, no school, not even a grocery store. Westcott literally suggested that “perhaps starving them of their beer and cigarettes will do it,” as if he is so bigoted that he believes those he disagrees with must be addicts who don’t actually need real food as he does.

Westcott does not care if people starve. He does not have an argument, all he has is the invocation of the government boot heel on innocent people’s necks. The entire point of Westcott’s impotent little tantrum is for others to suffer so he can feel better about himself.

There is not an ounce of unifying rhetoric in what he wrote, no passion to win the other side’s mind because he is incapable of understanding those who disagree with him. He is projecting his own ignorance and ad disregard for others’ lives onto unvaccinated Canadians who haven’t done anything to him.

The final line of this gross, unhinged rant is “Let’s not let the anti-vaxxers stop us from having this one. Lock them out, not the rest of us.” Coercion is not a choice, nothing of what you propose is rational or reasonable in the free societies our forefathers fought and died to create and preserve. 

My diagnosis here is that Craig Westcott is an intellectual lightweight, attacking people for making their own personal choices with unhinged rhetoric, threats of violence, and reducing civil liberties.

The biggest irony here is that he probably wears a poppy every November.