OTTAWA – Announcing a new set of guidelines for Canadians before assembled press, representatives with Health Canada have confirmed that vaccinated residents are now permitted to cough directly into each other’s mouths as much as they want.
“This pandemic has cost us all many of the little things we took for granted before: handshakes, hugs, forcefully expelling gusts of air from our lungs into another person’s open maw,” said Michael Utshaw, VP of public relations with Health Canada, “well, we are very proud to tell you that those small moments of magical connection can now return to anyone who has gotten the vaccine.”
The news was received with a warm sigh of relief by Canadians who have endured a long drought of being able to wantonly cough into the waiting mouths of friends and strangers. Whether accidentally done on a bus or street corner, or intentionally done between consenting adults, coughing into another person’s gaping face-hole has been a cherished tradition among Canadians of all colours, creeds, religions, and levels of contempt for public hygiene.
But not all members of the public took the announcement as a sign of the government finally loosening the chokehold on inter-orifice wheeze exchanges:
“My question is why we have even allowed the government to prevent us from coughing onto and into one another until now?!” wrote Kathleen Creed, a notable anti-lockdown activist, “What’s next? Letting them tell us when we can sneeze into the wind? Letting them give us permits to fart while standing on an escalator in front of someone else? Anti-Diarrhea laws on carnival Merry-Go- Rounds!?”
Yet, aside from a small minority of perpetually angry protestors, most Canadians greeted the news with an unabashed, free-for-all of hacking, rasping, throat-bursts extolling the freedom of the moment. Gone are the back-alley cough parlors charging a fortune for the momentary pleasure of having another person’s chest gales grace your lips. And with last week’s decree that putting your fingers into the mouths of others was again allowable, fervent Canadians are now permitted to pry open the mouths of the unassuming to ensure that the full squall of the cough makes complete contact with the palate of the other.
“It’s a very proud moment for Canada. No longer will people have to cough only within those in their bubbles” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he created an air-tight lip-seal with Minister Marc Garneau and exchanged repeated volleys of wet, staccato breath-blasts.
In similar news, Florida has announced that, despite surges in case numbers, they have no plans to repeal the mandatory Floridian greeting of licking each other’s eyeballs.
