UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is refusing to rule out the introduction of Domestic Vaccine Passports. “We’re looking at everything” he told the press at yesterday’s Downing Street briefing. He went on to say:
“What we are thinking of at the moment is more of a route that relies on mass vaccination….we intend to vaccinate all the adults in the country by the autumn…..plus lateral flow testing, rapid testing.
I think that will be the route that we go down and that businesses will go down. You are already seeing lots of businesses using the potential of rapid, on-the-day testing as well. I think that, in combination with vaccination, will probably be the route forward.”
Imagine a world, where you must stock up on testing kits (similar to pregnancy tests), that you will be expected to self-administer and pass, before being admitted to your workplace, or the shops, or even the theatre? Welcome to that world. Boris Johnson wants rapid testing to become part of everyday life. That’s what Operation Moonshot proposed.
It’s lunacy. He wants to routinely test people who don’t have so much as a runny nose or a fever, people who are perfectly healthy, to see if they’re carrying a virus. Let’s not forget that the man running the US coronavirus response, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said last year that asymptomatic people do not spread the virus.
And as for domestic vaccine passports, The Telegraph newspaper reported today that UK cinemas are keen to implement them, if it means they can get bums back on seats as soon as possible. According to the paper:
David Chadwick of Verifiable Credentials, which has received government funding to develop vaccine passports, said he had already agreed a tie-up with one UK theatre and cinema complex to trial the technology. Under the scheme, Verifiable Credentials would create electronic certificates for people to show they have been vaccinated. These certificates would be verified by the NHS and stored in a digital wallet on users’ smartphone.
When users buy a film ticket from a participating cinema, that ticket would be combined with the digital vaccine passport to generate a QR Code that would provide them with access to the theatre. Mr Chadwick said the trial was currently assessing the technical feasibility of the system rather than whether it was commercially or legally viable.
Do not believe government ministers, when they say that there are no plans for domestic vaccine passports. The government itself has funded the scheme. Pubs and restaurants will quickly follow cinemas lead. In the future, if ministers are ever challenged on the sheer tyranny of it, they will say, “Don’t look at us. We are liberal Conservatives. We can’t tell private business who they should and shouldn’t let in.” How utterly predictable this is becoming.
