On Sunday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid stated in a BBC interview: “I am pleased to say that we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports.” However, Number 10 has since clarified that vaccine passports are still a “first-line defence” against a winter wave of COVID-19.
Whatever the Government’s true position – it seems to depend on exactly whom you’re talking to – introducing vaccine passports could have harmful unintended consequences, even aside from the threat they pose to civil liberties.
It’s now clear that, while the vaccines do provide strong protection against severe disease, their efficacy against infection is much more limited. In July, the Israeli Ministry of Health reported that the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against infection had dropped to just 39%.
And an unpublished study by Qatari researchers found that the vaccine’s effectiveness against infection fell to zero after six months. (Though its effectiveness against severe, critical or fatal COVID-19 remained high for the study’s duration.)
The apparent decline in the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness may explain why Israel – which began vaccinating its citizens in late December – recently posted its largest daily total for the number of new infections since the pandemic began.
As many commentators have pointed out, the vaccines’ limited efficacy against infection rather undermines the case for vaccine passports. If vaccinated people are still capable of transmitting the virus, restricting attendance of large events to those who can show proof of vaccination is no guarantee of safety.
It would make more sense to create passports exclusively for those who’ve already been infected, since natural immunity seems to provide stronger protection against infection than the Pfizer vaccine. (I’m not seriously entertaining this proposal.)
The fact that vaccine passports wouldn’t have a large effect on spread isn’t the only problem. If implemented carelessly, they could actually lead to more COVID deaths.
How so? If vulnerable people (such as elderly persons for whom vaccines are less effective) are led to believe – wrongly – that the vaccines have strong efficacy against infection, they might take more risks than they otherwise would. For example, they might attend a large event, only to then become seriously ill with COVID-19.
Of course, the number of people in that category is likely to be small. But the hypothetical illustrates that vaccine passports aren’t simply a nuisance or a threat to civil liberties; they could even harm those they’re intended to help.
The small number of people still vulnerable to COVID-19 may need to continue taking precautions until more natural immunity is built up in the population. Vaccine passports will offer these people little protection in the meantime.
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Huh?
I suspect Jabby is on the whacky.
Or else he’s not a human at all, but one of those AI things pretending to be human, and got his wires crossed somewhere…
‘his’? Misgendering AI are we?
His comments on the other stories this evening suggest he’s been on that sauce for a few hours, yeah!
😀😀😀
I did not understand your post either
There is an impassable gulf one has to accept that sometimes.
Three cheers for the FSU!
…and those who contributed to the legal fees for his case.
This is great news! Well done to Lord Young and the Free Speech Union legal team for fighting for truth and justice for that former police officer.
Congrats to all concerned but true victory would have been the officers involved and their management and those responsible for their policies to be disciplined and their policies changed. The fine comes out of taxpayers money- including the victim.
True. Why aren’t the Gestapo in jail or at the very least, fired?
Before admonishing the officers, the procedures need to be studied, then the management questioned, including those influencing senior Police.
Policies do need to be changed, but I expect the problem starts well above those interacting with the public.
While “just following orders” is not a complete defence, I completely agree that those who give the orders and dictate or sign off on policies bear the majority of the responsibility, and it would not be right to throw the frontline troops under the bus which is the most likely outcome
Never mention to me the holocaust of our time just pretend it isn’t happening and to be this or that, Do what you want things won’t go well for you in terms of the universe. Like I said you are on a completely different wavelength and it is genuinely impossible for me to speak to you. I hope some clear voices appear on your horizon.
I may have shared this with you before, but below are two images, one is war, as a consequence of fighting fanatics, and the other photo is genocide.
Some people suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome i.e. think Israel are uniquely evil and therefore these people aren’t interested in any facts that run counter to their dogmatic ideology/prejudice. However just in case it gets through to one or two people I give the civilian death toll in Gaza, probably no more than 10-15,000 (obviously the figures released by Hamas are massively inflated) out of a population of about 2 million and ask if less than 1% of the population being killed in sometimes intense urban combat is what genocide really looks like. It’s also worth comparing the civilian death toll in Gaza with the civilian death toll in the battle of Stalingrad, an estimated 40,000 from a pre war population of 400,000, in less than 6 months, to show what can happen in urban warfare if the combatants didn’t care about civilian deaths and go out of their way to try and minimise them. Obviously it’s only Israel that’s trying to minimise civilian deaths, Hamas see’s each dead body as a recruiting tool.
Holocaust perfectly describes what would happen if the balance of power between Israel and Hamas was the other way round.
Excellent.
Well done, FSU!
You don’t mention the resignation of the chief constable or the dismissal snd down ranking of officers involved. perhaps that will come tomorrow.
Moral hazard: when a person knows there will be no cost and consequences for them personally because of their actions. This removes any incentive for caution, to self-limit, self-discipline, or moderate behaviour of not act at all.
I’d go for £200000.
Good news, but £20,000 sounds paltry.
“Tim Smith, the force’s chief constable, later phoned Mr Foulkes personally to offer an apology for the “ordeal he endured”.
PHONED?!!!! He should have gone round to his house, with the officers concerned and made them apologise.
Everyone involved should be fired and jailed. Otherwise next time it is you, or me or someone on your street getting the same treatment. Meanwhile, real crime, especially by the enrichers, goes unchecked…..
I think he should have said ‘thanks but see you in court’ to expose them to the embarrassment of trying to defend this and it would cost them a lot of time and effort they could otherwise have spent on other non-crime hurty words investigations.
In principal I agree, but as the FSU were going to be funding his court fight, they may have advised him to accept the offer (which may not have been their first, I don’t know).
Very encouraging news and I’m made up for Mr Foulkes, who did absolutely nothing to warrant such mistreatment and unnecessary stress.
Can’t believe I’m sharing something from Liz Truss that I agree with;
”People used to flee Eastern Europe to Britain for freedom.
Now in 2025, I went to @CPACHungary
to talk about the free speech crisis in Britain.
There is Soviet-esque political persecution of people like Peter Lynch and Lucy Connolly, while Labour lets thousands of violent offenders out of prison.
British institutions have been captured by leftist ideology.
They hate Western civilisation. They hate the family, they hate the nation, they hate free speech. …
Underneath all this is a very powerful network, a globalist network, who are very well funded and well organised, and are pursuing their own ideology.
The only hope is to take them on directly. … I know from experience that unless these people are taken on head-first, they won’t be defeated.
It’s not enough to just win an election. … They have rigged the rules against us.
We need independent media. We need the Joe Rogans and Ben Shapiros of the UK.
We need a great restoration in Europe. We need to restore Christian values to our continent. We need to restore Parliamentary sovereignty. And we need to keep going to Make Europe Great Again.”
https://x.com/trussliz/status/1928760108290298214
Well done, but bittersweet in that the tax payer will be paying the bill. These fines and legal actions, the Thames Water sewage leaks being another such case, need to contain an element of personal prejudice, so the senior officer or director is personally on the hook. Otherwise it’s a risk free mistake for the appointed idiots to make. Dismissal should form oart of the penalty too
Well done.
It would be better punishment if Kent Constabulary’s Chief of Police at the time of their outrageous intimidation of this man was forced to pay the fine personally.
As it is, taxpayers will be paying it.
Well done FSU.
However I don’t like the idea of the compensation being paid with taxpayer money. Money which could have been spent better.
Maybe the people directly responsible should be made to write ‘Brexit is great’ 1000 times or an essay on free speech…😊
I wonder if the officers involved – in particularConstable “Brexity” – actually understand now what they were doing that was wrong, and why?
The taxpayer is on the hook for it again. The compensation should be taken from the force’s pension scheme.
Personally I would think it would have been greater benefit for the head of Kent police to have been sacked, along with those down the chain who took part in this shameful affair. Instead we the tax payer have funded this Police force’s ideology and stazi led mistakes, no one has lost their job and so they are free to continue their very unique interpretation of what constitutes a threat to the public, continue to fail to solve any crime against the body or property of a person. In other words they will continue to ruin people’s lives, use our money to pay those victims off, and continue then to draw their salaries and gold plated Pension. Where is the deterrent?, where is the incentive to do the job they are paid to do?