If you won’t carry a ‘vaccine passport’, do us all a favour and stay at home

I do sometimes wonder if the country really does want to “send the coronavirus packing”, as Boris Johnson once put it.

If we are to treat this as a war on Covid-19, then it should be “total war”. Certain civil liberties have to be curtailed in such a circumstance. It might be “un-British” to have to carry a “vaccine passport”; but there’s nothing especially patriotic about lying in an intensive care unit, fighting for breath, either. We have a right to live as we wish, but no right to live in a way that endangers other people.

The persistence of the virus is now clear, and we are told we must find ways of living with it. Very well, but we need to minimise its impact, and restore the economy to its former health as soon as possible. Central to this is mass, frequent testing, which it seems we are only getting around to now; and also using every possible means to make sure people get vaccinated.

The “vaccine passport” will soon, rightly, be compulsory for international travel, and its internal equivalent, a sort of “green pass”, needs to be brought in as soon as possible. There must be some insistence about this, for the good of the community as a whole.

For employment in sensitive locations, such as care homes and hospitals, it must be compulsory, but also for other places where people tend to mingle, for example supermarkets, on public transport and entertainment venues: no jab, no job.

The same goes for education, as I have written before – for teachers, other school staff and, provided the trials are properly completed and prove the vaccine safe, for pupils. State education should be made conditional on being proven to be virus-free, either by recent negative testing, vaccination or antibody testing. No parent should have the right to send an infected child into a school where it can endanger the lives of other children, or their families.

It is strange that this seems so outrageous. Children may not remain relatively unaffected by the virus forever, as it mutates, and it is possible they could carry it, now and in the future. Vaccination could provide some defence. The principle of inoculating children against illness used to be taken for granted. Almost everyone in the country has had a BCG or MMR jab in the past, before conspiracy theories took a grip on so many. We eventually eliminated smallpox through a global vaccination campaign. Millions of lives have been saved. Millions more can be saved through Covid vaccination, but it needs to be as comprehensive as possible for the herd immunity effects to overwhelm the virus.

For consumers, the case for a “green pass” is also overwhelming, not least on economic grounds. Confidence will be needed to tempt many people back into the pubs, clubs, restaurants, stadiums, theatres, cinemas and all the rest. Some of us, after a year of watching Covid inflict its miseries, are still wary.

In a week or so I will have reached my peak immunity from Covid after taking my first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. This means that I have some protection from the very worst effects of Covid, but it is by no means a 100 per cent, science fiction-style force field, warding off any infection. I may also still become an unwitting carrier of the virus if I am infected (the scientists don’t know for sure about that). The present immunity may erode over time, especially before I receive the second jab, and the new “variants of concern” might be tougher for my immune system to deal with, even post-vaccine.

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I am also acutely conscious that many of my fellow citizens are “vaccine hesitant”, and have picked up some strange ideas about the vaccines, such as the possibility of coming under the mind control of Bill and Melinda Gates.

There are side effects to the jabs, well advertised by their makers, but the public’s inability to balance risk means that the relatively trivial danger of these, compared to the much more lethal and likely long-term consequences of getting a dose of Covid, continue to be misunderstood. There are still folk out there who think it’s no worse than the flu, or that the whole thing is a hoax by the global elite to destroy small independent businesses via the “great reset”, or something to do with aliens and lizard people and the European Union (ironically). The vaccine, alas, is not yet universal, and may not be with people like that around, but there is no need to encourage them.

So, I think I am being rational in remaining cautious about going out into the big wide, Covid-contaminated world. Not all of us are so desperate to get down the pub that we’re prepared to – literally – die for a pint. We need to make the country safe for our lives and our liberties to be restored for good. I do not want to live a future of Covid flare-ups and periodic lockdowns just because we botched yet another chance to send the coronavirus packing. Herd immunity, gained preferably via vaccination, is the only future.

Practically, it’s a huge challenge – but surmountable. We in Britain are not all that efficient at organising this sort of thing, so we should now approach the Israelis, where their “green pass” is well underway, and just pay them to set the exact same thing up in the UK. Or maybe that’s just Bill and Melinda Gates telling me what to say. Not a bad idea, either way.