Vaccine passports aren't about public protection but our unhealthy addiction to fear

I know! I know! Another bloody Covid blog! I’m as sick of writing them as I’m sure you are of reading them. But there is no reprieve. With every step in the right direction, it seems we face yet another horror – yet another authoritarian leap that would have seemed unthinkable just a couple of years ago.

The latest of such horrors is vaccine passports, which I have no doubt will be extended and extended until every activity that might involve leaving your house will require you to present your papers, and of course to get the NHS app whether you want the dam thing or not.

For those of us who have chosen to be jabbed, the immediate impact might be nothing more than the inconvenience and nuisance of it all, but it will be quite the nuisance. And what happens next time, when the medical procedure you must have forced upon you by the backdoor is one that you actually aren’t happy to have?

 

Vaccine passport enthusiasts have, in my view, completely failed to make any kind of sensible case for their cause. It’s pretty obvious that they do not believe their own rhetoric, because if they did, they’d be utterly incompetent.

If it is indeed the case that the unvaccinated present such a danger that public protection must override any ethical objections to discrimination on the basis of vaccination status, then the sensible thing would be to implement a policy that allows for a person to be excluded from aspects of social life immediately after they have declined their invite to receive the vaccine. What’s more, you would implement the policy as soon as you had a vaccine to offer, not right at the end of your vaccination campaign.

By arguing that vaccine passports should only be compulsory once everyone has had the chance of receiving a vaccine, you are apparently telling us that you’re quite happy for vaccine refusers to have been out and about, potentially for months, presenting the kind of threat that you claim to find intolerable. If in fact we can wait until the only people left to protect are those who have chosen not to take up any protection that the vaccine offers, then the overwhelming threat to public health cannot exist.

 

On the other hand, there are those who don’t seem to be able to make their minds up if the vaccine works at all. We should all have it, they insist in one breath; in the next, they bleakly intone that it doesn’t stop variants, it doesn’t stop you catching Covid, spreading it, or even  becoming unwell from it. So what exactly does it do? On the strength of this unimpressive presentation, not a lot, so one could be forgiven for asking why we need to go to such bother to ensure everyone falls into line and has it.

Of course, the doom and gloom is nonsense. The vaccine is the only intervention that has made any meaningful difference to the impact of the pandemic. It’s only with the increase in vaccinations that we’ve seen the link between the infection rate and hospitalisations smashed, as admissions and deaths are a fraction of what they were last time case numbers were at their current levels. This government’s extraordinarily successful vaccination programme has worked, and they know it. That’s why they’ve lifted nearly all restrictions.

And yet they, like the double-jabbed fools who go on wearing masks in the streets and wondering around in a state of perpetual terror, continue to be pulled in both directions. They continue to believe that the vaccine protects us, whilst telling us why it’s necessary to introduce draconian measures to protect those already protected from those who ought only to present a risk to themselves.

 

Sadly, coercive control and the abuse of power square that particular circle. Yes, it’s okay for us to think that the vaccine works enough to come forward, hopes raised that it promises a way out from the crushing tedium of life in lockdown, but not raised enough to ever believe in the joy of being left alone – of doing precisely what we want without being told what apps we must have, what ritualistic pantomimes we must follow, and what attitude we must hold to the risks that exist in the world around us.

Those who have power rarely desire to give it up. Neither politicians or the scientific establishment have any incentive to voluntarily retreat from the influence over our lives that we have unwisely allowed them to acquire. They understood, pretty early on, that the vaccine threatened their reign of terror. What if, once jabbed, we all felt safe and stopped caring? What if we all decided that we didn’t want to live in a socially distanced, muzzled freakshow of a society any longer than was strictly necessary? What if we concluded that there’s no point running from a virus that can’t make us ill?

So we’ve ended up where we are now, facing the prospect of vaccine passports, because those in whom we’re forced to trust lack both the skill and desire to lead the public out from the nightmare they plunged us into in the first place. But the idea of vaccine passports, whose justification falls apart on its own terms, will find its supporters. There will be those who, as they have done right from the start, will agree to “whatever it takes.” Whatever it takes to do what, exactly? To get to zero Covid? To get below an arbitrary threshold of case numbers? They don’t know anymore.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” That’s a good line for an incoming president who needs to rescue his country’s economy and morale from the battering of a severe depression. Yet we have gone to the opposite extreme, not choosing to confront fear but embracing the fetishizing of fear. We prefer to live with fear than try to break free of it; we see that fear gets things done; we think ideas are good because they remind us of our duty to fear.

No, there is no good argument for vaccine passports, but there doesn’t need to be. The reason for that is very simple: vaccine passports aren’t about public protection but our unhealthy addiction to fear.