Government Review

Asked about the vaccination programme during a visit to a nursery in West London, Boris Johnson suggested that everyone must have been offered a jab before any immunity status certification system could come into force. The BBC reports:

He said no decisions had been made but there would be an update on the idea in April. A review will report in June.

There were “difficult issues… moral complexities, ethical problems that need to be addressed”, the PM added.

Any passport could also reflect a negative test result as well as whether someone was vaccinated or has immunity.

Good to know that Johnson is engaged in such hand-wringing over the ‘moral complexities’ of the matter.

He continued:

“There are some people who for medical reasons can’t get a vaccination, pregnant women can’t get a vaccination at the moment, you’ve got to be careful about how you do this.

“You might only be able to implement a thorough-going vaccination passport scheme even if you wanted such a thing in the context of when absolutely everybody had been offered a vaccine.”

In the Commons, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, who is leading the review, told MPs: “A system that relied purely on vaccination would not be appropriate.

“What would be right was a system that ensured we could open up our economy to the maximum extent that takes into account both vaccine status but also of recent test status and indeed potentially also antibody status as well,” he added.

Johnson Suggests All Adults Must Be Offered Jab Before Passport SchemeRead More

The Government’s ‘Call for Evidence’ to its Covid-Status Certification Review is open for another five days, until March 29th. Anyone can respond as an individual, and although a cynic might suspect that the review is a piece of theatre designed to confer legitimacy on a foregone conclusion, a healthy quantity of negative responses from the public would be no bad thing.

The page states:

The Government is reviewing whether Covid-status certification could play a role in reopening our economy, reducing restrictions on social contact and improving safety.

Covid-status certification refers to the use of testing or vaccination data to confirm in different settings that individuals have a lower risk of getting sick with or transmitting COVID-19 to others. Such certification would be available both to vaccinated people and to unvaccinated people who have been tested.

The Government will assess to what extent certification would be effective in reducing risk, and its potential uses in enabling access to settings or relaxing Covid-secure mitigations.

The government is looking to consider the ethical, equalities, privacy, legal and operational aspects of a potential certification scheme, and what limits, if any, should be placed on organisations using certification.

We are issuing this call for evidence to inform this review into Covid-status certification, to ensure that the recommendations reflect a broad range of interests and concerns. We welcome views from all respondents.

This idea has been gaining a head of steam recently despite ministers initially making noises to the contrary. It is an idea that ought to be anathema to any Western liberal democracy, and which, on the Government’s own terms, makes no sense once at-risk groups have been offered vaccinations, accounting for a vast proportion of potential hospitalisations and deaths.

We would encourage all Lockdown Sceptics readers to make their views known. The ‘Call for Evidence’ can be found here.