15 minutes was all I could stomach. Watching Zahawi squirm and stutter through non-committal waffles of answers to serious conserns raised by MPs (the few left in the chamber) about the implementation of the most illiberal, coercive, divisive and discriminatory legislation to be waved through Parliament.
He wouldn't even tell MPs whether they would have a vote on it. Just that vaccine passports would be subject to "Parliamentary scrutiny".
The implication is there will be no vote. This is therefore a law which is not going to be made by Parliament. It willbe made as an executive diktat on the spurious grounds that this is still an emergency and not already an endemic virus in circulation.
MPs need to seriously wake up and realise they no longer make the laws in this country, they simply rubber stamp them after the event when the govt's emergency laws give them the slenderest opportunity to do so in between lockdowns and recesses.
He talked about transition from pandemic to endemic but would not commit to even a general statement that the vaccine passports would be temporary and be cancelled once endemic status had been reached. He even suggested it would be too difficult to provide a statutory definition of when that would be. How can they then be said to be transitional in the same breath?
The implication is that they are intended to be permanent (see Canada).
He relied on evidence from other countries that nightclubs are superspreader events, despite the fact that they have been open in England since 19th July and the govt's own UK trial events gave absolutely no evidence they would be a risk. Contrast with fully covid certificated events which have been proved to cause spikes in so-called "cases".
He justified jab passports here because other countries have introduced them thereby directly and intentionally bypassing the govt's own trial events and the PACAC report.
He talked about him personally not wanting to have to close nightclubs. He must therefore know in advance of additional legislation and powers to be granted to him as vaccine minister rather than those reserved to the health secretary under existing covid related diktats to close venues.
One assumes those new powers won't stop there.
I just read part of the govt's response to its own PACAC report relating to so-called vaccine passports.
Whilst most of it was full of a combination of waffle, spin and obvious side-stepping the actual issues and concerns, curiously their main argument FOR vaccine passports was in a very linear way jabs = less severe symptoms = less transmission effect = reduction in infection.
1. That ignores real world science demonstrating the viral load of jabbed people an be as high or higher than those unjabbed.
2. Ignores real world evidence that vaccine passports haven't worked elsewhere (Israel)
3. Curiously, suggests that despite 1 and 2, the fact the jabs reduce symptoms so people are effectively asymptomatic solves the problem. That is having spent months and millions of £ on advertising frightening the public that asymptomatic transmission was the main driver of the "cases"..... (see also Australia where the idiots in office there actually said you could catch it from simply walking past someone).
4. Ignores any notion of natural immunity or the relative strength and duration of natural immunity to any protection offered by the jabs.
