Commentary Call me a bit slow off the mark, but it wasn’t until toward the end of September when I sensed the shift of COVID-19 from a medical pandemic to a moral panic. The obvious catalyst was the advent of vaccine mandates, which turned the “miraculous” prospect of protection from the virus into a means for effectively compelling obedience for obedience’s sake. Any notion of choice in getting vaccinated was vitiated by an instantaneous imperative for social conformity, which rivalled forms of religious shunning in ferocity and implacability. Even appeals to charter-guaranteed rights and freedoms weren’t met with rational counterargument and compelling evidence of the greater good being served. They began to be dismissed with crankiness gusting to contempt for those making them. Those who raised voices of caution about threats to liberty were ranked as outcasts even when they were duly double-vaccinated. The epitome was leading Globe and Mail …