AIBU to ask if anyone cares? (Passports)

[Revertion]

I'm posting here rather than in the CV board because I don't think this is actually about the virus anymore.

We all saw it coming, some earlier than others, but it's coming on the 1st of October.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/covid-19-vaccine-passports-required-in-scotland-for-entry-to-large-venues-from-1-october-12403321

https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-mandatory-vaccine-certification/

Honestly I could weep. And I can say that as someone who this plan, in it's current iteration at least, is not going to affect in any way.

But this is setting a precedent. An unprecedented change to our way of life and it has happened without being mentioned on any manifesto, without public consultation, and without clear plans, scopes, limitations and exemptions having been finalised.

It’s saying that in this country, we can limit your daily life based on your perceived health status and we can measure that perceived health status any way we choose to and we don’t need to provide any scientific reasoning, justification, or evidence that there is a need for it or benefits to it.

That is without getting into details about human rights, valid exemptions, and the blinding issue of an end date being based on ministers (not medics or experts) consideration on preventing spread of CV, when the very same plan says, regarding negative testing as an alternative, that it is not considered appropriate because it would undermine one of the main aims which is to encourage vaccination.

So the scope of the plan is not even aligned with the aim.

That is the precedent we are setting here and it is coming from a government who are attempting to make emergency powers permanent (subject to public consultation - for which there is already a CLEAR PRECEDENT of this government entirely disregarding on other issues).

Yes, yes, slippery slopes are a fallacy and all that. But can we call it that when the top of the slope isn't ethically or morally 'correct' and you don't have to make too many logical distinctions or conclusions before you get to the bottom?

AIBU to think this has the potential to be dangerous?

And, specifically if you are in Scotland or follow Scottish politics, AIBU to think the current government really have no line when it comes to their reach into personal lives and freedoms?

(This is coming straight off the back off their attempts to make emergency powers permanent, the 4 year olds can change gender, the thoughts can be a hate crime, etc. Where does it end?).

I'm really having a 'final nail in the coffin' moment this morning. Feel utterly powerless. BUT prepared to be told I'm unreasonable because I'm apparently also a masochist....

My husband who is CEV had a very bad reaction to his first vaccine, now on blood thinners. He still had the second as if he gets Covid he IS DEAD, blood thinners for life or die sooner from Covid, no brainer.

@Justcallmebebes

Totally agree with you OP. It's not about the virus and it has very sinister implications which all those disagreeing with you haven't really thought through. Covid passports today, what will it be tomorrow?

As an aside, I'm job hunting at the moment and a couple of jobs have specified only double vaccinated candidates will be considered. I am double jabbed so no agenda from me there

How rude of you to think that those of us who disagree with the OP "haven't really thought it through". Do you feel like that about everyone who disagrees with you? That they're just a bit thick..

I also think it's incredibly rude and arrogant to say that those that don't agree with you haven't thought it through

Of course I've thought it through I've just reached an entirely different conclusion to you.

How do people on the thread feel about the requirement to lodge medical conditions with the DVLA to drive then?

This is also perceived risk...

Yes, it's a perceived risk of X illness or condition causing X harm.

The person has to actually have the illness or condition.

We can't say... well, over X age are much more likely to have dementia, and those with dementia are much more likely to cause X so we should ban them from driving.

It's not democratic's chance of having dementia multiplied by dementia risk of causing harm to others.

It's dementia risk of causing harm to others.

So surely to make the comparison to DVLA then it would be infected risk of causing harm to others.

Not wilfully unvaccinated chance of having infection multiplied by infection risk of causing harm to others.

They're not the same.

I do see your point and I think that a negative test should be accepted as an alternative to vaccination status. Between the two alternatives though I'd rather have a passport that only looks at vaccination status rather than no passport at all.

I 100% agree with everything you've said OP. I am increasingly feeling quite depressed at the way this country is heading and feel powerless to do anything about it. It's alarming how quickly people have accepted these restrictions, and how any voices which disagree are silenced in the media (I mostly listen to LBC - anyone who isn't 100% pro vaccine/passport is immediately reprimanded, labelled a conspiracy theorist and cut off!)

Coercive control is supposed to be against the law - yet here we are, coercing people to have medical procedures they don't want and having to 'show their papers', it really is quite unbelievable. More shocking, the amount of people who support it.

I'm double jabbed and not a conspiracy theorist, I just don't like the way this is going. If someone told me 3 short years ago this would be happening I wouldn't have believed them.

Even more depressing that if there was an election tomorrow nothing would change

(Also, my periods have definitely changed since I had the vaccine!)

I strongly disagree with vaccine passports, they take away human rights. So controlling.

When ID cards were under consideration here we got the same argument 'ID cards today...what next?'

ID cards have been in place on the continent now for a long time...what sinister scheme has it ended in? Nothing.

We had similar around CCTV. What sinister scheme has that ended in? Nothing.

Going even further back when passports were introduced the exact same anxieties were expressed then, what sinister plot has this come to? Nothing.

If you go back to Victorian times there were the same concerns and anti-vax protests against the compulsory smallpox vaccine. What sinister ending did that have? Nothing

Would people on this thread have preferred that there hadn't been compulsory vaccines against smallpox? I'm genuinely interested in that...

There is something very important that a lot of people don't seem to understand.

The government has not taken your rights away. The PANDEMIC HAS. Coronavirus is what caused lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine passports...all of which are intended to keep you safe, and help us all get our rights back.

Just a quick note for everyone saying 'in this country xyz'. You do realise that this is worldwide, it's not just where you are? Because I see those kind of comments and it's a bit odd. If you don't want to have a vaccine or say you've had it fine, but don't expect to be able to go everywhere or do everything just because you want to. Others looking after themselves isn't just to be against you, it's to protect themselves.

@lemmein

I 100% agree with everything you've said OP. I am increasingly feeling quite depressed at the way this country is heading and feel powerless to do anything about it. It's alarming how quickly people have accepted these restrictions, and how any voices which disagree are silenced in the media (I mostly listen to LBC - anyone who isn't 100% pro vaccine/passport is immediately reprimanded, labelled a conspiracy theorist and cut off!)

Coercive control is supposed to be against the law - yet here we are, coercing people to have medical procedures they don't want and having to 'show their papers', it really is quite unbelievable. More shocking, the amount of people who support it.

I'm double jabbed and not a conspiracy theorist, I just don't like the way this is going. If someone told me 3 short years ago this would be happening I wouldn't have believed them.

Even more depressing that if there was an election tomorrow nothing would change

(Also, my periods have definitely changed since I had the vaccine!)

I'm interested in your view on the compulsory smallpox vaccine - it rid the globe of a devastating disease but was completely compulsory.

Had you been alive at the time you would have been arguing against the compulsory vaccine presumably?

Do you think that was correct and that it would be better to have smallpox continue to protect the freedom of choice of people at that point?

If you were the Govt at that time what would you have done?

While I can see your point - what I don’t see is any suggestion for potential solutions.

I also find it weird that if 3 years ago someone had told you there was going to be a pandemic that killed millions of people that your mind wouldn't stretch to the thought of there being various tactics employed to encourage vaccination - some carrots, some sticks.

That seems a bit short sighted especially given the history of the compulsory smallpox vaccine.

Revertion you've quoted my post as if it were an answer to your argument when it was purely a rebuttal to the statement that the vulnerable were all protected by their vaccination status.

wheresmymojo I was going to ask if smallpox made a comeback on an island would people be OK with travellers from that island being allowed into other countries with no checks or would that be different when you're the one at risk but it didn't know if it'd work as an example.

What else can you expect from a government who charges its residents more tax than any other country in the UK, then gets upset at boris raising tax (pot, kettle, black nicola, you raised our council tax as well already despite saying you wouldn't), has an area with the lowest rated schools in the UK, destroys its NHS, watches more people dying from drugs while not caring and is still harping on about independence and not fixing the problems.

Scotland is going downhill rapidly. This is just another addition to the crap.

@tigger1001
@LizzieMacQueen
@Aquilegiagazer

Totally agree with your points.
The Scottish government has so little opposition. I can only hope the young who are most affected by this desert the SNP in droves.
And if it’s so important why is the TRNSMIT festival going ahead , with nothing but a clear lft, which lets face it could belong to anyone.

Basically a (smallish) proportion of people value their individual liberties above society.

They have a more cynical view of institutions and tend towards dis-trust.

Plotted on a bell curve you will be at one end of the spectrum (and there will be overly trusting people at the other end).

There's nothing wrong with this per se...in some circumstances you would be the ones that spotted something was wrong when there was actually something bad going on.

However your thoughts of where this could end are likely to be biased towards the negative side of reality.

That's not because the rest of us are skipping around with our heads in the clouds.

Around 6 in 10 people in the UK support COVID passports compared to 3 in 10 against them.

It's reasonably unlikely (but not impossible) that you're the ones that are correct.

It's also strong enough levels of support in the public that doing a consultation would waste a lot of money and time in a very time-critical situation.

I've had both my vaccines but I massively disagree with passports!

I still think everyone should have a choice whether to get any vaccine or not, everyone should be in control of their own bodies. Introducing these passports is just a way of forcing people to get something they're not comfortable with without actually making it mandatory.

Yes you could say they do have a choice but the choice is then to not be able to live the life they want with restrictions on what they can do, so in my opinion, it isn't really a choice at all

Do you think you should be allowed pay cash for a plane ticket and walk on without going through security? No passport, no checks? If so then you have a point but if you agree with passports and safety and security checks then you really have nothing to complain about.

Same logical fallacy as the DVLA medical checks, imo.

We are checking that person for the actual thing that might cause harm to others.

Do they have a weapon or anything that could endanger other passengers?

We are not blanket banning entire demographics based on perception of risk and no logic applied, as is the case with unvaccinated but prior infection.

If a parent or carer is carrying formula in liquid form, the formula is tested.

We are not allowing parents and carers (those with valid exemptions to travel with liquids) on the plane anyway because they have a valid exemption.

I think there is a valid point about i.e USA on the whole does not let convicted criminals from the UK enter. But that is a foreign country, not domestic, and the domestic side of that argument - citizenship deprivation - like this, set a precedent and still highly controversial.

"“It could be seen as an abdication of responsibility to remove citizenship from someone who was radicalised in our country, who left when she was a child, and who we are relatively well-equipped to deal with, whether by prosecution or deradicalisation.”

This is wholly valid for those not vaccinated, and even more so. The unvaccinated didn't cause this, it was either nature or a lab on the other side of the world and subsequent mismanagement. If they are not vaccinated there will be a reason and the vast majority of those reasons will be due to distrust in the government (with their policy of fear, gaslighting and noble lies) mistrust in pharma (with their history of profit over consequences) or distrust in the technology (which has never been seen on this scale before and could be avoided by focusing resources on expediency of Novavax EUA, for example).

And we are relatively well-equipped to deal with the risks and consequences i.e 90% are vaccinated, the disease does not have a high fatality rate, we can test for infection, those at higher risk can take precautions.

Doesn't bother me in the slightest. It imo is no different than not being allowed in countries without yellow fever vaccine etc. It is change, people don't like change.

It’s ridiculous. I am sick as a dog with coronavirus right now. But I could get into allllll the nightclubs because I am double vaccinated.

And all the double vaccinated clubbers could get sick as dogs too. And then - off work, pressure on NHS etc. So what was the point of the passports..?

Yes you could say they do have a choice but the choice is then to not be able to live the life they want with restrictions on what they can do, so in my opinion, it isn't really a choice at all

Nobody can simply live the life they want with no restrictions. If people don't want to get vaccinated, they don't have to. But then they can't have the benefits of being vaccinated, can they? But again, those restrictions are because of the pandemic, not some arbitrary decision of the government.

@Revertion

I'm with you. The world is increasingly bonkers......scientifically it would surely make sense to be pouring money into state of the art testing over vaccine passports.

We had lots of interesting stuff on the Covid board about the direction things were going in a bigger picture sense and it was all taken down for being conspiracy theory.

Surveillance capitalism in many guises is huge business.

This article caught my eye recently

www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/08/study-finds-growing-government-use-of-sensitive-data-to-nudge-behaviour

But a prevailing attitude seems to be so what?

China and its social credit system is a good example of wide scale experimentation on what people will tolerate and how we can be pitted against each other.

People think it will lead to some utopia, but goal posts will be pushed and pushed and when you're no longer in favour do you accept your re-education with good grace? And any sanctions that may affect you?

As to solutions - as I say, if the important thing is minimising spread, then better testing is far more logical when if vaccines reduce symptoms people may not realise they are ill and spread it anyway. I caught Covid from a double vaxed person who had tested negative the day I saw them then positive the second day after. They had been to a festival and followed all the rules to the letter - which begs the question are the current strategies fit for purpose?

It just seems pointless when Covid is still running rampant through the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated.