What follows is a guest post by our technology correspondent.
Grant Schapps has been doing the media rounds today announcing that the NHS App is going to be the vehicle for vaccine passports, as I predicted on this site last month. That is going to cause huge problems. What we did not hear in those media interviews were any questions asking when its sister app, the NHS Test and Trace app, is going to be withdrawn. Why would they ask that? Well, because Matt Hancock said that is what he would do.
He could not have been clearer about it. In a letter to Harriet Harman’s Joint Committee on Human Rights on May 4th 2020 he wrote: “We intend to withdraw the app once the epidemic is over and it is no longer required.”
Is the pandemic over? Sarah Walker, Chief Investigator on the Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey and Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at Oxford, says so. The Telegraph reported her saying: “Britain has moved from a pandemic to an endemic situation.” That was on April 23rd so plenty of time for Matt Hancock to have gone onto the app store and withdrawn his app.
Why the delay, Matt?
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no idea what the NHS app is. Track and Trace I downloaded out of interest. Turned off bluetooth then deleted it after a couple of days and just wrote ‘Neil Ferguson’ wherever I had to go in. time to get rid of smartphone I reckon
The assumption that you will always have a ‘phone appended to you has constantly irritated me, anyway. I do use one when convenient or useful – but I haven’t had the graft that so many fellow citizens seem to undergo, and I certainly am not adding another useless app to its clutter.
And then there are those of us who only have a decade old Nokia to take on car journeys!
There are two prerequisites for withdrawing the app in the statement:
We intend to withdraw the app once the epidemic is over and it is no longer required.
Reasonable to conclude that they still think it is required for something…Or want it to be.
Also interesting to see that the loon was describing the situation as an epidemic in early May 2020 and not a pandemic… Should we read into that?
Other issue with the NHS App is it doesn’t work in Wales and i believe Scotland.
Its an NHS England only system.
The pandemic won’t be over until SAGE says it’s over. With all their nonesense talk about a third wave either this summer and winter, plus the repeated BS that no one is save until everyone is safe, i.e. the whole world has benn vaccinated multiple times it’s obvious that it will be claimed we’re still in a pandemic for years to come, no matter what the data on “cases” and deaths in this country says.
They just allocated another £25 billion (yes, billion) to Track and Trace, on top of the £12 billion that’s already been sunk into it. That’s just the English system, not the entirely separately developed ones being inflicted on people in the provinces.
As a software developer, I’m struggling to see how you could spend £12 million, soup to nuts, on the whole thing
The only objection from the Public Accounts Committee was that there should be “long term value” from that money.
So whatever monster it morphs into, it’s here to stay.
How can the PAC pass that? Its literally criminal.