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Covid Passports - Yay or ney?
- Thread starter MongMastermind
- Start date
AfghanAndy
LE
They can’t keep the furlough scheme in place indefinitely. They’ve kept it in place for long enough now to get vaccinations to a large enough number of the population that’s most likely to die from Covid.
we’ve got half of the population unvaccinated, but statistically less likely to die from Covid, but all indications are that those unvaccinated members of the population will be jabbed in ten next few months.
so it’s a case of risk management. You can afford to get people who are less likely to die from Covid catching Covid, especially when you’re out of flu season as the hospitals will cope whilst the tail end of the pollution play catch up with the vaccination process.
as I’m said before, this things going to be carrying on for a year or two now until we’ve gone through a few variations of mutations of the virus. However the hard works been done. Should we get hit with new strains of the virus, the time consuming bit of the vaccine development has already been done. There’s no need to go through all of the large, time consuming and costly development phases for vaccine development. Any tweaks can be done in a matter of weeks and out straight into production as we do with the seasonal flu jabs. People aren’t going to require two jabs, just the one. Nobody’s going to be getting worried about manufacturing capacity in the U.K. we’ve gone from a negligible vaccine manufacturing capacity to very soon being able to export globally. (Remember we’ll only need to do sport one vaccine instead of two) for example, Astrazenca s U.K. sites have capacity to produce two doses of vaccines for everybody in the U.K. theres novavax vaccine manufacturing going on in Teeside and Valneva in Livingstone. All of these are quite low volume compared to the EUs production capacity. Then we’ve got the facility in Braintree that can knock out 70 million vaccines every 4 months.
we’ll get to the stage that the risk of Covid outweighs the harm of the measures in a few years when it’s like the flu. Everybody has been exposed to a few different variants of the virus just like the flu so the vast majority of the population can cope with it.. The virus does what it does, adapts, becomes more deadly and contagious and generally calms down and stops killing people in order to survive. It’s a bit like when the old world discovered the new world. The new world hasn’t been exposed to our nasties before so they killed huge swathes of the population.
At that point it’s dealt with like the flu. No risk of overwhelming health care, mechanisms in place to protect the most vulnerable with booster shots and carry on jogging.
I originally thought people over reacted at the start. Speaking to people who understand the science behind this, having a contagious virus spreading throughout the world with no natural immunity or available vaccination is an arse loosening proposition for those in the know.
AfghanAndy
LE
I’m with Boris on this one. One of the worst mistakes the U.K. made was devolving responsibility .
SWJ99
War hero
I know April fools is over now, but does that necessarily mean we can start believing the government again ?
It's cos I is got the plague innit ?
Joking aside, what are your views on the suggestion that whilst the vaccines are still officially in their trial stages, some life insurance policies will not pay out if the policyholder dies from vaccination complications ? I'm not sure whether to believe it or not. The tin foil cat people seem to believe it's a thing, but I don't have any life insurance, so I haven't got a policy document to check.
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Federal it now covers all ages starting from 16, so if you get her back she can have it, and depending on which one she gets she can get the 2nd shot before returning to her studies. ( 1 month ). And hey illegals are getting vaccinated so she should get her entitlement.
You latched onto that little hobby horse didn't you.
Well its nice to know that you cant be discriminated against unless you're a particular ethnicity or religious group and certainly not if you can't drive, of a certain age or of a differing political outlook or personal view.
Yep that's me told clearly I'm stupid (obviously intellect doesn't fit your list either) but I don't agree with some of what you say.
And currently no one is asking for money for a vaccine passport, but then driving licenses we're for life until the photocard ones came in and suddenly every 10 years you get to buy a new one, unless the DVLA screw up and give you 15 years and a lifetime HGV license without any medical required (cheers easy).
And currently no one is asking for money for a vaccine but currently they are sold at cost and will be until the WHO declares the Pandemic over then its retail all they way baby.
There's no such thing as a free lunch and a vaccine passport scheme is going to cost and you're going to need a whole new CS Dept to run it and have offices with staff and managers and some sort of enforcement arm unless you plan on devolving those powers the the Police or local Councils (who will naturally need financial incentives) and then there's legislation to support it and all for what exactly?
Everything shows that the worst the vaccinated can expect if they catch Batflu is a bit of a cold, you wont die and it's very unlikely you'd end up in hospital, so the only person at any real risk is the one who decided not to have the vaccine, so if they die (around 0.2% chance) its their own fault.
Or they pass it to another unvaccinated person who has also made the choice not to have the vaccine so again, own fault.
Or as a vaccinated person you happen to have it and presumably be unaware your sick or you'd be tucked up in bed unless your trying to kill people (asymptomatic cases described as very rare (not 'rare') by BMJ and other studies say doesn't exist at all) and pass it to the unvaccinated person. Even though its their choice your level of altruism is so great you cannot face that possibility of killing another by your inaction.
In which case I imagine your support group already has enough guilt to contend with what with that bout of chicken pox/flu/mumps/measles you had when you were 7 going on to kill countless others and you cant sleep at night as a result.
AfghanAndy
LE
The vaccine passport is going to have a cost. That cost however pales into insignificance compared with the costs associated with allowing a contagious, new to mankind virus run wild.
there’s always an economical argument to most things. I guess somebody questioned why Kamikaze pilots were given helmets to wear. The reason was so they didn’t knock themselves out resulting in a mission failure. (Cost of helmet versus cost of plane and pilot training conducting an unsuccessful mission)
As I’ve explained earlier on, associated costs with doing nothing are likely to increase. The cost of treating people after they’ve caught it far outweigh the costs of doing nothing. Public liability payouts are likely to skyrocket if people are getting ill, or even dying from picking up contagious diseases in public places. Therefore passports make sense from an economic sense compared with the potential financial class action suits that could be launched when it was found that government/organisations failed to do anything to address the issue.such vaccine passports aren’t required long term though. Just for A few years until the virus is brought fully under control.
I don’t know if these are genuine concerns you’ve had, or concerns raised by the anti vaxer campaigns to justify their stance .
And how many of those do you have to present on a daily basis in order to go about your business?
AfghanAndy
LE
Obviously job dependant but I can think of common examples where I have to, or have had regularly show.
bus pass.
Bank card
Passport
Driving licence.
Membership card etc etc.
additional material I’ve had to show is.
proof of income.
Proof of insurance.
Proof over ownership.
Proof of educational qualifications held.
Proof of a criminal records check
Proof of betting status.
mot may be that you’re not able to make the links yourself. But it’s quite simple. In order to do A, you need to have B and C in place. That situation you accept as normal.
what’s being asked for now in order to do A and ensure X doesn’t negatively impact on people or society, you now need to have B and C, and until such a time as X is under control, C.
I guess it’s a bit like Visa’s for travelling. I hate visas. Not because of what they stand for, I just hate the form filling and delay. I don’t mind the automatic systems such as the US Ester system and that’s not particularly time consuming.
But because of my dislike of filling in forms. I either have the choice of marrying somebody who enjoys filling forms in form me, or not travelling to places where I have to fill forms in.
sometimes I have to go to places where I have to fill forms in so I’ll take it on the chin and fill the form in.
Some government form Filling though is quite good. The American visa waiver system for example doesn’t require you to fill the forms in each time you visit. Neither does it get passed on as the responsibility of the multitude of different carriers you could use to get to the states.
they have one centralised system that allows you to fill the form in once for a limited length of time. Not only does it allow you, the visitor to have reduced workload, but it also means that hypothetically you could track down easily any potential carriers of a disease.
a lot of these passport concerns were raised before the successful rollout of the UKs vaccination process. Concerns were initially raised that the initial slow rollout would disadvantage many further down the prioritisation list for vaccinations. In the light of the most likely holiday destinations for many is going through a third wave of infections.due to a poor vaccination rollout process. We should have offers vaccinations to everybody who need them by the end of July and huge swathes of the planet haven’t even started vaccinating it’s populations. Most of these concerns are null and void now as we’re not stopping people leaving as they’ll all have been a vaccinated , but they’ve got now where really to go to as those destinations aren’t really accepting visitors.
when you’re in a hole, stop digging as so far you haven’t appeared to have been able to give one justifiable reason for not putting into place a mechanism that will be enable the reduction in the spread of a highly contagious virus in the middle of a pandemic.
wrinklyone
LE
It depends. Still not a problem.
Well if we're going to do this why not go the whole nine yards? National biometric ID card, fully secure. Need to show it to travel on public transport and to enter any public building. Need to present it along with any form of payment, if you remember the old "cheque guarantee" cards (never had one myself but my parents did) except even with cash. Required to show it on demand to any official, any of whom can pull up all your records, and spot checks on workplaces to make sure everyone has theirs. And you better have it on you when an ambulance picks you up or they'll leave you where you lie. Sound far fetched? Maybe that last one, but where would you draw the line? Because once the investment is made in rolling out national COVID passports, it will be leveraged and reused for everything else, why wouldn't it be? And even if you trust this government not to abuse it, do you trust all future governments?
A vaccination certificate that's a just crappy piece of paper or cardboard obviously not meant to last with no personally identifiable data would be acceptable and not open to abuse, I hope that's what they settle on.
AfghanAndy
LE
There’s a massive reluctance to national ID cards in the U.K. for political reasons. There always has been. The last tome we rolled them out was WW2 out of necessity. Churchill abhorred them and promised they were a war time necessity as he recognised that they were against British civil liberties and would be defunct as soon as they weren’t needed.
Both times that national ID cards have been introduced in the U.K. have been in response to a significant external threats. The first time in WW1, the second time in WW2.
Both times they’ve been introduced they been withdrawn at the earliest possible opportunity.
Identity cards in Britain: past experience and policy implications
H&P is a unique collaboration between Kings College London and the University of Cambridge. A network of 500+ historians who engage with policy makers and the media.
www.historyandpolicy.org
They’re mandatory on the continent and accepted probably because our European chums have a love affair with autocratic dictatorships. However this is why Blair tried to roll them out to bring us in line with the EU as yet another step to ever greater standardisation building towards a United States of Europe.
civil liberties are often very closely related to national law. Remember that we in the U.K. have a completely different legal system to the continent.
of we look at passports for example, the main purpose of a passport is to prove in an internationally recognised manner, who you are and what rights you should be afforded whilst abroad.
a temporary Covid passport is the same. It should prove that you’ve vaccinated and you should be afforded the right not to be treated as a potential health risk to the community.
Chef
LE
That's the sticking point though, modern technology is such that once it's been introduced I suspect that it will suit the authorities to keep them running and maybe bolt on extras as time goes on. Certainly I can see them being extended each time a new variant or vaccine is produced, so that'll keep them going for a few years.
Much of the current restrictions have been passed in a hurry with little or no real scrutiny by parliament. the speed with which the rules can be changed is also worrying. remember the Christmas fiasco? Also some of the other bans on travel imposed overnight? We're not the only ones to do that though, France did the same with some of their ski resorts.
The vaccines were meant to put an end to the other restrictions, like the cavalry coming to the rescue. Instead we're now told that the vaccines aren't 100% effective (Which ones are?) and that as a result the restrictions and potential for another lockdown cannot be ruled out.
Will there be a 'spike' when the restrictions are lifted? I'd say it's a racing certainty; more people out and about it's likely to happen. Then again there'll also be extra road accidents for the same reason. Will that be used to justify lockdown powers 'For the duration of the emergency'?
ETA I've had my first jab and carry my certificate as a matter of course. Given I don't have a smart phone or any intention of getting one I'm screwed if they decide to go for an app only system.
That Dr Fauci - who seems to be the American equivalent of our Neil Ferguson - is now claiming that there is a new variant that "evades the test" and so masks must continue to be worn. It's clever that COVID, like it can tell if you're eating a scotch egg or a substantial meal and knows when to infect you.
Chef
LE
I have a grudging admiration for Prof Ferguson, he seems to have been wrong about everything he's been asked to opine on, Foot and Mouth, bird flu, swine fever etc. He has so little belief in his own predictions that he was quite happy for his piece on the side to bimble across London for a bunk up at a time, when according to his ideas, she may as well been playing Russian Roulette with a Luger.
Yet still he gets invited back, at great expense, to give advice.
As for this government and the next they have the power to order the population into house arrest, close internal borders and shut down businesses at a moment's notice. I don't see them giving up that level of control in a hurry.
