I understand why people are against vaccine passports but...

[User135644]

I understand why people are against vaccine passports, but a lot of those most vocal against it are the usual crowd who have been anti-lockdown and anti-mask throughout (and often anti-vaccine). They won't accept vaccine passports but will be the first to complain if and when nightclubs are forced to close again due to the impact of the virus which without vaccines would already be a lot worse with the Delta variant.

They can't always have it both ways.

It took us centuries of precedent to create the free liberal society we have.

Centuries.

And it is being destroyed in 2. Because we can’t accept risk and death as a fact of life.

Don’t give that away so easily.

@WillowGrand that’s really well said

**Since when has it been acceptable to use the young as a human shield?

WTF are you talking about?
They want everyone over 18 to have the jab that can. Are you aware that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic?

But I agree with the posters above, in a matter of a year we have gave up our freedoms so easily.
And vaccines passports will now divide our nation into two groups.

@Dave20

**Since when has it been acceptable to use the young as a human shield?

WTF are you talking about?
They want everyone over 18 to have the jab that can. Are you aware that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic?

Vaccines are not the only way out the pandemic and young people are not at risk from covid, the only reason they are being vaccinated is to protect the vulnerable therefore they are being used as a human shield. Cowardly.

**Vaccines are not the only way out the pandemic and young people are not at risk from covid, the only reason they are being vaccinated is to protect the vulnerable therefore they are being used as a human shield. Cowardly.

What do you mean being used as a human shield? Covid will be around long term, so everyone reaching adulthood will be offered the vaccines presumably for the long term.
Were old people used as test dummies when they were first in line to get the vaccine?
I don’t understand your logic.
Besides, most countries now look like they’re going to have a vaccine passport system, so young people not vaccinated won’t be able to enter these countries, although that’s slightly off topic.
They now want everyone over 18 to be vaccinated.

**Vaccines are not the only way out the pandemic and young people are not at risk from covid, the only reason they are being vaccinated is to protect the vulnerable therefore they are being used as a human shield. Cowardly.

Sorry, just to add, do you hear what Chris Witty and Patrick Valance have been saying? Basically vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic. If we didn’t have the vaccines, we’d still have restrictions in place, Patrick Valance said as much recently.

@Dave20

**Vaccines are not the only way out the pandemic and young people are not at risk from covid, the only reason they are being vaccinated is to protect the vulnerable therefore they are being used as a human shield. Cowardly.

Sorry, just to add, do you hear what Chris Witty and Patrick Valance have been saying? Basically vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic. If we didn’t have the vaccines, we’d still have restrictions in place, Patrick Valance said as much recently.

If vaccines were the way out of the pandemic they would prevent infection and spread but they don’t, even with 100% vaccination it will not go away.

Just because everyone is doing something doesn’t make it right, the very fact that that young people are not at risk and the vaccine is not 100% effective anyway should be enough for anybody to realise that something is wrong.

I believe the vaccines are 89-90 %effective? Nothing can be 100%.
You may disagree with the vaccines or young people getting them, that’s your opinion and choice.
But I don’t want to live with social distancing and restrictions for the rest of my life, hence why I got the vaccine.
Whether we like it or not, Coronavirus is here to stay in one form or another and so will the vaccines.
I don’t agree with passport vaccines, but it looks like it’s creeping in.
So if people want to go abroad, it looks like they’ll need the vaccine. There’s nothing we can do about it whether we like it or not.

The vaccines will not stop the spread as they are not 100% and therefore won’t prevent restrictions either. How effective they are is not yet clear and depends on which one has been used.

Well if the vaccines aren’t effective I don’t know what the answer is. Surely we can’t afford economically to have more lockdowns? And people’s mental health too. God only knows what we’d do.

It isn't just about preventing risk to the young people who want to go clubbing....if they get covid, how many could be affected? It's a more risky activity than anything outdoors.

What about the CEV people who can only be protected if the majority are vaccinated? What about their 'rights' and 'freedom' to not catch Covid from other people's risky behaviour? Or are the rights of those who are young and healthy the only ones worthy of protecting?

@Dave20

Well if the vaccines aren’t effective I don’t know what the answer is. Surely we can’t afford economically to have more lockdowns? And people’s mental health too. God only knows what we’d do.

Testing, testing, testing and vaccines that actually stop you passing it on, will be our way out of the pandemic. Not one where there is a 10% chance you’ll end up on a ventilator anyway.

We should be reducing transmission. I’d prefer people were tested and had proof of that before every event as it will make them more cautious than someone who has had a vaccine.

And what is wrong with social distancing exactly. Every morning I had to put up with body odour and coffee breath. Social distancing means now I don’t have to.

There is simply not a “10% chance of ending up on a ventilator”, that’s not true.

but a lot of those most vocal against it are the usual crowd who have been anti-lockdown and anti-mask throughout

Bullshit.

I'm against this level of government intervention as I think it harms those with health issues more in the long run. Normalising surveillance society creates data for companies (particularly health companies) who can then discriminate for their own financial reasons.

I'm double vaccinated. Been pro lockdown and felt it wasn't early enough on all occasions. I am not pro opening up but think that masks should have been mandatory for slightly longer. On nightclubs, im undecided on whether 19th was the right date. I probably leaned towards giving them another two weeks but the data from the last couple of days suggesting cases overall are down - and more significantly that the growth in cases in younger age groups is about to go negative looks really promising.

James Ward @jamesward73
case growth in the worst-affected age group (20-24s) is falling further and faster than I had dared to expect, now firmly into negative territory: 1/4

other age groups are following, although on slightly less precipitous trends. in particular the growth in older (over-60) age groups is slower to fall, but that's to be expected - so not a concern at this stage. 2/4

so now my overall R estimate for England is poised at a tantalising 1.01. note there is still some incomplete data in this, but it also has 3 days of averaging, so I'd hope for the next day's number to be a bit lower again 🤞. 3/4

I'm still refusing to get too excited, we really don't know what Step 4 is going to mean for case growth, or when exactly it will feed into the data. so please treat any "it's all over" tweets with great caution. but I'd much rather be here than where we were last weekend. /end

Now its early days but if the trend continues the argument for passes starts to become much weaker.

The argument for passes tends to ignore tbe point that cases wont rise forever and we will reach a point where there is enough immunity not to get these huge peaks and there is a significant disadvantage in these type of measures because they endanger the viability of the entire industry. So you end up with people not going to nightclubs as they've closed (especially smaller ones) or packed in like sardines into bigger ones.

My fear over vaccine passports also is based on how it will drive a criminal trade in fake passports or situations where dickheads get vaccinated multiple times for others for financial gain. Or just people faking things off their own back en masse. Thus endangering others without them being aware.

No one who is pro passports ever tackles the potential risk from criminality.

My point here is that people who are resistant enough at vaccines at a certain point will actively look for ways to bypass the system rather than be forced to change their minds because we have such a high uptake. We are talking about the entrenched who are difficult to change minds. Forcing the issue is more likely to further deepen entrenchment in a sizeable percentage of those left unvacinated rather than have the desired effect because thats human psychology for you. Gentle persuasion of the stubborn few by not being confrontational is likely to yield better results.

The ONLY place im in favour of them is for travel and then i think it should be linked to your passport and you don't have to download apps etc - passport control are the only ones who can see this. But this relies on countries banging their heads together...

@Chessie678

OP I think that you are starting from a premise that covid rates must be controlled in some way regardless of the collateral damage and that therefore, if you don't accept some methods to control rates e.g. lockdowns, you must accept other methods. You are also assuming that lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports are each effective ways to reduce covid rates and / or save lives.

The anti-lockdowns / anti-mask people you are talking about are unlikely to accept one or more of these statements. This is where the dissonance comes from. If you don't believe that masks are effective, you are not going to believe that they are a viable alternative to lockdown (and this is not such a crazy position - it was reported that an expert from SAGE claims that cloth masks are almost completely ineffective in asymptomatic people the other day).

I'm firmly anti-lockdown and, for me, lockdown is orders of magnitude worse than masks or vaccine passports due to the catastrophic harm it does. I'm surprised that lockdown was so easily accepted whereas there is quite a lot of pushback on masks and vaccine passports - for me the focus is on the wrong thing.

However, I'd probably say I'm anti-mask too because I think there is too little evidence of them significantly reducing case rates over a long period of time to justify a mask mandate. If you compare the strength of mask mandates in different countries / states it is difficult to see a significant correlation between strong mask laws and lower covid deaths, particularly when you control for other variables. I also think they have significant downsides. I've worn a mask when required throughout and will continue to do so in some settings in order to reassure nervous people however.

In terms of vaccine passports, I don't believe that vaccine passports for nightclubs will significantly impact case rates of covid and I don't think the government believes that either. I think, as you seem to, that they are a soft coercion method to get more people vaccinated. I don't think people should be threatened in this way in order to induce them to get medical treatment that they arguably don't need when the use of the vaccine passport itself has no provable public health benefit. It is fundamentally dishonest and sets a horrible precedent (should HIV positive people be denied entry to clubs too?). I might be more in favour if there was strong evidence of the use of vaccine passports significant reducing transmission and saving lives but there isn't so far as I can see. (And I say this as someone who is very pro vaccine in general but also pro bodily autonomy). It also seems fundamentally unnecessary to me - vaccine rates in the UK are extremely high and we haven't exhausted options for persuading more people to get vaccinated without coercion.

So that's how you can hold these three views at the same time. There is a libertarian thread to this in that I believe that strong evidence should be required to support measures which significantly limit an individual's freedom and that there are some things which no government should ever do (e.g. banning people from seeing their family). (Though I don't personally think it is extreme libertarianism to object to the government imprisoning innocent people in their homes for months or coercing people to accept a medical treatment in order to live a normal life.)

I agree with this poster.

The thing I would add is that it is a racist idea. Ethnic minorities have a lower uptake of the vaccine so vaccine passports will disproportionately effect ethnic minorities.

By now I doubt there are many people left who want the vaccine. (UK) I think we should just leave the ones that don’t want it alone. What ever the reason they have is.

I took the vaccine as a civic duty but I don’t expect everyone to have the same civic duty. I also don’t think people with poor health should be made to feel bad about not taking it. When you have had bad experiences of health care you aren’t going to jump up and volunteer.

I don’t agree with vaccine passports because they discriminate based on ethnicity, health status, and freedom of choice.

Do not forget that vaccines are only effective to a certain point. People will be lead to believe that they are 'safe' due to vaccine passport venues. This is a fallacy.

The next debate incoming is over waning vaccines and people who are eligible for passports but wont be able to get one because the english, welsh, scottish and ni systems were built independently and dont recognise each other and some people had one vaccine in one jurisdiction and others in another.

The reality for some is still, if you are vulnerable clinically its probably best if you think very hard about going to a nightclub even if you are vaccinated and a vaccine passport program is in place. See how things pan out and then make decisions further down the line, but not now.

The other point rarely made is that those going to nightclubs now are people most likely to be otherwise engaging in high risk behaviour. If thats the case, there's a fair chance it will burn or has already burnt through that population very quickly indeed.

Once passports are introduced i think they will be used for other things, and purposes which aren't to our interests. I think their value is limited in effectiveness and in terms of timescale going forward.

@WouldBeGood

There is simply not a “10% chance of ending up on a ventilator”, that’s not true.

If the vaccines are 89-90% effective there is a 10% chance of anything else happening is probably a better way to say it.

There’s a small chance of becoming unwell with Covid is more like it.

I have been dbl jabbed. I know covid is out there but I'm so against this idea.
, since numbers are still high, I think we can say having the vaccine does not stop the spread. If people are wanting to take the risk with their own health then that's their freedom of choice. I think we are on the start of a very slippery slope.
Im not a covid denier but with all these new restrictions. I find myself really getting sucked into believing that the whole conspiracy theory's about great resets

Sorry i meant to say im pro opening up not that im against it.

I am not antivax, anti mask or anti lockdown.

Im definitely a moderate.

I have seen too many vaccinated people think they are now invulnerable too and not able to get covid. For me thats problematic. People alter their behaviour because of this type of fallacy just as much as antivaxer believe false information

Passports rest on the assumption that they are massively effective.

The Euros were a farce with this - those in stadiums were on passports but they had to board busy tubes where there were lots of unvacinated to get to Wembley. And anyone without a ticket just partied (illegally) in the street.

Last year we had a series of illegal raves locally because night clubs were closed. There were loads of problems with crime associated with them (rape and drugs).

Again if demand for raves outside vaccine passports are there, these will happen. And these carry much higher risks imo.

No one talks about unintended consequences and makes the assumption that the passport will be successful and protect people.

I think you have to think outside the box in terms of whether thats really true and what might happen outside the parameters of what you can control.

Thats why i only support passports for travel. Everything else has a whole bunch of fallacies and problems that supporters of passports dont want to even acknowledge because they are so blinkered about the subject or fall outside 'coronavirus is everything' bubble.

It’s also the case that numbers are now falling fast in England

Do not forget that vaccines are only effective to a certain point. People will be lead to believe that they are 'safe' due to vaccine passport venues. This is a fallacy.

Totally agree. It's more of a 'spectrum' of immunity - the vaccines are clearly waning over time in effectiveness, if you look at the Israeli data. However I was listening to Dr John Campbell yesterday and he said the UK data showed quite different rates in declining effectiveness and transmission protection - and he puts it down to the gap between 1st and 2nd doses. The Israelis went with the 3 week gap, the Brits with anything between 8-11 weeks. This latter is looking to be much more effective. He is worried re the USA where the 3 week gap is standard. (This is re Pfizer's vaccine).

All this means that over time, as the months go by, vaccines may be offering lower and lower protection (hence why boosters are being talked about).

Personally I am against vaccine passports, not only because it's not clear cut re immunity but even more so because of other implications as to how they may be the thin end of the wedge re introducing other controls and use of our medical and other data.

For travel, that's another matter as we cannot control what other countries require.