The vaccine pass regulations taking effect from Wednesday at 6am have been published (SI2021/1416).
They apply to nightclubs, indoor non-seated events with over 500 people, outdoor non-seated events with over 4,000 people, and other events with over 10,000 people.
As well as vaccine passes, a medical exemption certificate or clinical trial participation can be used to enter. You can also use a report of a negative NHS test taken in the past 48 hours.
The criteria are, as usual, utterly arbitrary. Why is a nightclub any higher risk than a pub for example? How does a football stadium with 10,000 seats present such an increased degree of risk over a stadium with 9,999 seats that the former justifies these measures and the latter can be a free-for-all?
Clearly it's only being applied to a limited number of places for now, to make it difficult for anyone to argue it's unwarranted. And then just as in other countries - and parts of the UK - it will in due course become mandatory across more and more of daily life "to help fight the virus".
Since LFTs are self-reported, that makes the entire regime completely useless in a stroke.
Anyone who thinks that alternative will remain available (for free or at all) is delusional, I'm afraid. It's just a proviso that's being put in to make it palatable enough to get it over the line.
The reason for its eventual removal will almost certainly be one or more from the following bingo sheet:
- "It's too expensive. You should have to pay for tests yourself if you're unvaccinated."
- "The tests are too unreliable/don't detect the X variant"
- "People can submit false negatives"
- "There's no way of telling whose sample it is"
We're crossing the Rubicon here. Once this is introduced it's difficult to see the circumstances under which it'll ever be removed, let alone have its scope reduced.
More £10,000 FPNs too, such as for counterfeiting a CovidPass.
Of course. How else would you get across the message "it's almost impossible for us to detect this offence so for anyone we catch, we'll "offer" them a FPN far larger than the fine they'd get if they took it to court. That'll put them off!"
William Hague's opinion piece in today's Times is very revealing:
The four or five million adults in the UK who still have not had even their first vaccine are compromising the health and freedom of the vast majority.
...
Sir Andrew Pollard, the Oxford scientist who chairs the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunology, has said “Covid-19 is no longer a disease of the vaccinated”.
...
The inescapable conclusion of such evidence is that a refusal to be vaccinated, excepting those cases where people are immuno-compromised and have a medical reason not to be jabbed, is an important factor in keeping everyone else under threat of restrictions on their liberty.
...
Compulsion would raise formidably difficult problems of enforcement and is ethically wrong — even in the world wars, people were not compelled to fight. But doing a great deal more to persuade, nudge, incentivise and push people towards taking part in our collective defence is another matter.
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Proof of vaccination to enter a venue is no guarantee that you can’t catch the virus there, since efficacy of vaccines wanes over time and fully jabbed people can still carry it. But experience abroad suggests that more people will turn up for their injection when their access to aspects of normal life is at stake.
Quite apart from the selective use of facts (and out of date data), the argument effectively seems to be "it's immoral to force people to get vaccinated ... but it's perfectly fine to make daily life so difficult they have no real choice".
That's an absurdly inconsistent argument if you ask me - and as recent data shows, the current round of Covid vaccines' efficiency peaks quite soon after the administration of a given dose. So is Hague (and others like him) seriously suggesting we will need to be vaccinated every 3-6 months, and show vaccine passports "proving" we have complied with the latest diktat, forever?
And if so, for what? To get the vaccination rate up by maybe 5%, at best? Is that seriously worth throwing away bodily autonomy for?
That's the road that most of continental Europe has gone down but it's a very sinister path. Before Covid, I'd have said we are better than that here. Sadly it's clear we are not. We are going down exactly same path, just a little later than them, and based on exactly the same flawed arguments.
