Fab jabs and the vexing vax pass
Last weekend, the queue snaked around the car park at the Royal Festival Hall in the town of Petersfield. It was orderly and the vibe was positive, serious and grateful; I heard people thank the volunteers and medical professionals administering the first dose of the vaccine; “thanks for everything you’re doing”.
It felt like one of those moments of shared experience when you feel part of something big, simultaneously national and local, like election day or the first ‘clap for carers’. It also put me in mind of the London 2012 Olympics, a pride that we had met the logistical challenges (and won so many medals!).
The vaccine has tremendous potency both in protecting us individually against the virus and benefiting us collectively too, helping to reopen society. It will bring confidence, perhaps too much confidence, that we can move away from our contact-free lives and return to something like normal.
After my jab I was given some advice with reference to the new paperwork I was handed; “you should keep that, maybe take a photo of it in case you lose it”. It was like a nod and a wink to the current debate about vaccine passports.
Such passports are so controversial that a cross-party group of 70 MPs have joined forces to warn against them. Baroness Chakrabarti has said they risked a “checkpoint Britain”, while Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said that using them to decide whether people can enter pubs would go against the “British instinct”.
However, Ipsos MORI’s surveys show that the public are full square behind them. Six in ten support the idea of needing one to go to the pub or eat out in a restaurant (62%), or to go to the gym (63%). Nearly seven in ten say they should be needed to go to the theatre or an indoor concert (68%), and support is even stronger in terms of visiting relatives in hospitals (74%) or care homes (78%) and travelling abroad (also 78%).
Throughout the pandemic the British have been consistently hesitant about returning to normal ways; it’s as if, in their minds, the burden of proof is firmly on those who want restrictions lifted or avoided, rather than on proponents of new measures or those wanting to retain existing ones. On the flip said, as Sir Keir explained; “[if] we get the virus properly under control, the death rates are near zero, hospital admissions very, very low, the…instinct in those circumstances will be against vaccine passports.”
As part of that instinct, the British are hard-wired towards fairness and, beneath the headlines, the Ipsos MORI survey results point to some jeopardy. One in five think the ethical and legal concerns outweigh any potential benefits to the economy, and half say that vaccine passports may lead to inequalities. Younger people, ethnic minority Britons, and those in more deprived areas are less likely to support the policy.
Another issue for policy-makers — and we’ve heard this before during the pandemic — is the challenge of providing clarity on the end point i.e. if passports are introduced after all adults have been offered a jab by the end of July, what needs to happen before they are withdrawn? People will want to know. Clarity would also be compromised by any devolution of decision to pub landlords and others, and Britons despise ‘postcode lotteries’.
The Government is undertaking a review and has time to think this through. It will need it. Sir Keir also acknowledged that “this is really difficult”. It sure is.
