Vaccine passports may prove a pointless distraction from Omicron

Sajid Javid ditched vaccine passports when he became Health Secretary but he now has to bring them in again, albeit in an updated form where a lateral flow negative test will also be accepted. But how to get this past the Commons where 65 MPs have now decided to rebel? How to do this now given that the argument – that vaccine passports restrict transmissibility – has now collapsed? The big news is that the AstraZeneca vaccine has ‘zero’ effect on people catching Omicron. The vaccine still offers protection from getting seriously ill, but the premise of vaccine passports – that the double-jabbed are less likely to be infectious than the unjabbed – has just collapsed.

Things are moving so fast that vaccine passports may prove to be a pointless and relatively useless distraction from a far bigger point. If Omicron is half as likely to put you in hospital (this is regarded as an optimistic estimate by UK officials) that won’t mean any less pressure on the NHS if there is more than twice as much of it about.