Comment on the Toon
It took a bit to get this one right. I started by sketching a fat guy in a business suit, but it didn’t properly convey the comorbidities - “the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient” - that I intended. So I redid it.
It‘s well known that the greatest risk attached to COVID hospitalizations and deaths involve one or more conditions - principally obesity and diabetes - along with age. (The median age of COVID death in BC in 2020 was 86).
Hence the revised toon of a vast pudding of a man on a mobility scooter, raining judgement down on a woman protestor and her daughter. If he existed as a real-world character, he’d have a liver harder than asphalt, a pancreas ready to pack up, lungs blacker than a Netflix crime documentary, and a heart as clogged as a rastaman’s pool filter. (Let’s not get into his colon.) Let’s just say that as a result of bad lifestyle choices the guy on the scooter suffers from the very ailments that radically increase his risk of being hospitalized or dying from COVID, a disease which threatens the unhealthy far more than healthy, and the elderly much more than the young.
Yet even though he and others like him present an enormous burden to the health care system, even discounting COVID, he believes he’s a responsible Canadian - because he’s agreed to participate in a mass experimental trial of entirely novel gene therapy injections that don’t offer full protection against transmission and infection of COVID-19. He insists that the woman take care of herself and others by doing the same as he. And if they don’t, they should have their health care nixed.
This is a more common viewpoint among Canadians than you might think, if online comments and even newspaper headlines are any indication.
As for the placard-carrying woman and her daughter, “My body, My Choice” is a long-standing expression in the global feminist movement, proclaiming the individual’s right of bodily self-determination for sexual, marriage and reproductive choices.
“My Body, My Choice” has been enjoying something of a revival and reframing during the massive - and massively underreported - global protests against vaccine mandates. This is a right that actually predates gender politics and the feminist movement. It was enshrined in the postwar Nuremberg Code against medical experimentation without informed consent and the Declaration of Helsinki that followed.
Though most Canadians probably don’t know about the Nuremberg Code, it seems unlikely our leaders are also without a clue. They certainly know about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which vaccine mandates arguably violate. This is undoubtably the reason why provincial governments are not directly enforcing vaccine mandates on their populations, instead choosing to offload the enforcement onto businesses, educational institutions and civic organizations, which are then left holding the bag on any possible legal challenges.
If I drew this unhealthy fat fellow wielding a placard - and I wouldn’t because he can barely hold up a cartoon cigar - it would read, “Your Body, Their Choice.” In any case, it’s an old saw that if you have to explain a joke it’s no longer funny. If you’ve got this far, the toon may now seem less amusing…but perhaps more informative!
Dead accurate
Geoff I have been following your work for ages and great to find you again. You did some art for us for a charity project ages ago. For reasons WHY this is all going on , legal researcher Ronnie Lempert has a new book out , fully referenced about the $$$ trail behind it all. See canuck law dot ca