Why Seneca College isn’t offering testing as an alternative

In recent days, a welcome flood of vaccination policy announcements has poured out of government, businesses and organizations covering students, patients, employees, customers and caucus members.

It’s a case of better late than never, now that the Delta variant has firmly taken hold.

But the sharp-eyed will note that “mandatory” vaccination policies fall into two camps: those with frequent testing for the unvaccinated and those that don’t.

Here’s why Seneca is not offering testing as an alternative to getting vaccinated. The foundation of every public health strategy to defeat a virus is vaccinations. Full stop.

Other measures — masking, distancing, washing hands, disinfecting — are temporary prophylactics to buy time to get vaccinations in arms.

As we have experienced for the past 17 months, masking, distancing, scrubbing and disinfecting is bothersome, inconvenient and expensive — which means they are often observed in the breach.

Yet, sadly, the corrosive erosion of trust in our society has undermined public health efforts to vaccinate everyone. Yes, everyone.

Remember smallpox? It once killed three-out-of-10 people infected. It was eliminated by a global effort led by the World Health Organization.

Canadian youth may vaguely recognize words like polio, mumps, measles … viruses and diseases they will never have to confront, unless the anti-vaxxers succeed in spreading their terrible life-threatening misinformation and lies.

And if they do, will we take testing to its absurd extreme — frequent swabs for the more than a dozen sickening, sometimes fatal, viruses and diseases that we now keep at bay with vaccines?

Human rights legislation obliges us to offer vaccination exemptions on the basis of creed. That right has been twisted by a fringe that uses social media to promote pseudoscience and selfish individualism, claiming constitutional cover.

Medical exemptions are also possible, although that too is often abused because of an aversion to needles or someone read something somewhere that made them uneasy.

Pope Francis said it well: getting vaccinated is an act of love. And to truly show our love for each other, we have to finish the job.

COVID-19 cripples. COVID-19 kills. It’s a dangerous, devious, mutating roulette wheel that lets some escape with a sniffle and puts others in the mortuary. As long as we give millions without valid exemptions the option of testing, however well intentioned that is, we are allowing the virus to continue to breed.

Yes, vaccines aren’t perfect. But compared to a strategy of trying to catch the infected with testing every few days … not even close.

Vaccinations are the way we will beat this virus. Vaccinations — in every arm, in every country — are the way we will save lives. Vaccinations are the way we will finally, finally, be able to return to our new post-pandemic normal.

If you want to come on a Seneca campus as of Sept. 7, you must be vaccinated. Full stop.

David Agnew is president of Seneca College, the first Canadian postsecondary institution to require vaccinations to come on campus this fall.