Contrary to his speech denigrating protesters, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needs to listen to their demands and avoid alienating a huge portion of the population of his country.
The entire point of Covid-related policies is to prevent a crisis, and to prevent what is essentially a form of congestion in the state's ability to help the people. The whole idea of vaccination is to prevent the waste of the state's resources on treatments, the taking up of hospital beds, the use of supplies, et cetera. If the policies are instead causing exactly such problems or similar problems due to opposition, they need to be re-evaluated
Against interlopers
It should be unacceptable for those without knowledge of health matters to intrude into them and tell people what is best for them, and it is akin to malpractice or even murder. However, there is the problem of the reverse, when medical advice takes precedence over economic advice and even overrides any tact in how to handle human affairs or govern a country.
What has most likely happened is that governments, including the Canadian government, have surrounded themselves with health-focused advisers and bodies in an effort to focus on the pandemic, resulting in negligent handling of other affairs of the state. Alienation of the population and an inability to reach or convince many millions of people has resulted, because those advising the government are not skilled in that area.
The risks
The pandemic is one thing, but it is a whole other world of risk to try to confront huge protests and try to lecture the population on their personal choices, or force them to comply. This risk is potentially worse than the pandemic. Countries whose regimes find themselves at odds with their population but refuse to budge can descend into massive violence quickly, with potentially limitless casualties, far worse than the pandemic itself.
States need to consider that in order to help people, they have to be able to placate the population. Nobody appointed governments as arbiters of scientific accuracy, logic and the persuasion of the public to reason. In fact, states are themselves irrational structures based around memory, emotion, and stories sown into banner, edifice and icon. For them to pretend that they now represent the wills of rationalists and scientific bodies, and deny and chastise the masses and their beliefs, is absurd because that is hardly what any government was ever conceived to do.
Health policy must be balanced with respecting sensibilities of those who are ruled, which absolutely cannot be ignored. Vaccine mandates ought to be pursued where agreeable and plausible, and scrapped where not.