The case for immunity passports

For more than 20 years, I’ve been raging away at pointless rules. When my blood’s up, there’s not a foam-flecked Tory backbencher that can hold a candle to me. My friends blanch when I start on again about risk aversion in the C of E, dogs banned from beaches, the pond-weed creep of health and safety. I can ruin dinner parties, easily. And yet the idea of vaccination passports, which has my freedom-loving friends fit to be tied, leaves me quite calm. Bring them on, I say, and quickly. I don’t for a moment believe that Covid immunity cards are the first step on the dismal path to a Chinese-style social credit system. I don’t even think they’re the first step to ID cards. And — what’s the alternative?

The virus is here to stay, much though I’ve tried to believe it isn’t. I almost persuaded myself, last year, that Covid would retreat, vampire-like in the summer sun. But it didn’t. Instead it became clear that in Britain, for whatever demographic or geographic reason, letting the virus off its leash means looking like Lombardy last March: devastation for the elderly; thousands dead who could have been saved; hospitals over-run and unavailable. And the lesson of Manaus is that this can happen repeatedly. They had a catastrophic first wave, but under they went again this winter.

So we can’t just get on with it, just open up and sod the consequences — not least because there’s no mandate for it. It would be the bitter end of hypocrisy if a Brexiteer like me were to start insisting that the will of the people is irrelevant; and that the majority are too dense and too anxious to see sense. So we have to tackle coronavirus one way or another, as the variants creep and spread, and this means either successive lockdowns, or a set of measures designed to stop the spread: quarantines, border closures, testing, masks, vaccination cards.