England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

For example, that report says that 97% of the blood donors has some kind of antibodies, either from vaccine or previous infection. This number is almost 100% for older people. Maybe blood donors are not representative of the population, but if they are, it's not obvious that the extra 3% buys you anything, even if you could capture it.

For some age groups (Table 4), the vaccinated are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. I am sure there are good reasons for this, e.g. people more at risk may be more likely to be vaccinated, but whatever the reason is, the vaccine does not seem to be powerful enough to compensate for the extra risk.

it is also worth noting that the CDC, so far, does not recognize vaccine-induced long haul syndrome as a real syndrome.

edit: re vaccinating the young, you need to pay special attn to the risks of myocarditis and pericarditis, which can potentially outweigh the benefits of the vaccine. vaccine advocates already made this mistake of ignoring vaccine risks with young women / GBS previously in the context of another vaccine and it would be a tragedy to needlessly maim the young with these new innovative vaccines.

edit: dear creeps who are downvoting me without a reason, please take note of another HN submission at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

Short? It’s been a year and a half with no end in sight.

Now the question is what further restrictions now would do.

I think there are some things we should definitely encourage as not very intrusive (especially when it’s encouragement not law)—e.g., using FFP stuff rather than surgical/cloth masks in crowded spaces when possible, ventilation, &c.

I don’t think that we’re really waiting for anything though. We are not throwing everything at getting better vaccines. Nor are we going to massively boost vaccine uptake. (Maybe we should wait for the 12-15 category I suppose, since then we’d be closer to herd immunity.)

Finally, the NHS is not imminently going to be inundated. This might change in a few weeks. But delay right now isn’t necessary to avoid a March 2020/December 2020 apocalypse.

So in my view restrictions now would merely delay the inevitable since nothing would actually change. This is in contrast to last year when we were waiting for the enormous breakthrough of vaccines, or in February/March as we vaccinated the vast majority of adults. I do think it would be a plausible strategy to dampen things for a month whilst vaccinating those aged 12-15 though—I suspect vaccination would do nearly all the work there though. (On a tangent, I don’t see why we don’t just administer the first dose to them anyway—even if the second is too risky the first is much safer.)

The alternative was to see them close one by one, I’m personally very happy with the way the EU vaccine pass has been implemented.

He was Home Secretary before being Chancellor, and in that role opted to keep up the Hostile Environment policies and Deport First, Appeal Later policies.

I mention those two, because they are indicative of a "papers please" type of culture.

The former requires every minor landlord to perform a "right to rent" check on every tenant or lodger they suspect to be not British, or face a large fine. Inevitably leading to landlords choosing not to rent to non-British people to avoid the hassle and risk of getting it wrong, an increase in homelessness among people without the right papers to prove they're allowed to pay for a home, and an increase in abusive housing relationships.

The latter ensure that illegal actions by the Home Office go unchallenged despite statistics showing the Home Office often acts unlawfully and often loses in court. It's very difficult for a person to conduct an appeal after they're removed from their own documents at home, legal support, income, friends, and other resources; this is also borne out in statistics: No appeal lodged in this way has succeeded, which stands in stark contrast to appeals lodged in country. (The UK Supreme Court just ruled this policy unlawful. I expect the Home Office will try to continue the policy anyway.)

Point is, Javid said he was going to address injustices in the immigration department when he became Home Secretary, and then he didn't.

Last time I booked a hotel via an app at the last minute for an overnight stay after going to the pub in a city away from home, the booking process didn't mention we needed to show our passports at reception. It was a new policy for that hotel.

When we went to the hotel, about midnight, of course we didn't have passports with us, why would we? It's not normal to take your passport when visiting a neighbouring city for a night out.

I've stayed at countless hotels, and never had this problem before. But I understand the UK is becoming more draconian so perhaps a rule had kicked in since the previous time I went to a hotel. But I had the impression, it was a recent policy change by this hotel, and "oh, we should update our website".

It was pouring with rain, there were no other hotels accepting bookings by then, and the last train home would be in a few hours. Our Uber had dropped us off, and hotel reception was telling us we had to go outside into to the pouring rain as we couldn't stay despite having paid.

They knew perfectly well who we were. It wasn't an identity thing. We were able to show booking numbers, credit cards, confirm emails, and other forms of identity. But not the type their new policy required.

They required every guest's passport, not just one person. As luck would have it, we each spent about an hour trawling through the contents on our electronic devices and online, and we each found images of our passports in some location or other because of the ubiquitous requests for photos of passports these days, and those photos were accepted by the hotel.

If there was a good reason for it, possibly. But this is a ridiculous analogy, because there is no plausible reason for this. On the other hand, there is a good reason for strongly encouraging people to get the vaccine, as well as an excellent reason to restrain pro-virus people from spreading it more.

This is a problem - it is often not very informed.

As for medical history, we have to show vaccination records for a number of things - school, travel sometimes, certain lines of work.

Proof of vaccination against a highly mutation-prone virus in the midst of a pandemic doesn't reveal anything more about you than it would about anyone else - which is specifically allowed via HIPAA, for example. It's no more medical history than knowing your age.

These points don't really stand up for me. It's like saying "I choose to believe they cause autism, I've been informed by my other Facebook Mom group members, thus I do not consent."

None of it is based on science or rationality, in my opinion.

Your medical history is not a "protected right." The people who provide medical care to you are not allowed to release your medical records without your consent.

Then you have examples of the "worst atrocities and abuses in history" that were due to schools requiring vaccinations?

The GP comment said "driving a car," not hiring one. It's not clear to me why you responded to a different assertion, and I can't find anything that supports the idea that you don't need to show a driving license while driving if it's requested.

https://www.gov.uk/stopped-by-police-while-driving-your-righ...

"If you do not have these documents with you, you have 7 days to take them to a police station. You’re breaking the law if you do not show the requested documents within 7 days."

> You can go into just about any library and read a book without showing a library card.

If I may be so bold, I think it's fairly reasonable to understand their comment (in the context of requiring ID) as referring to checking out/borrowing books from a library to read, rather than simply reading them in a library.

The main objections to vaccine passports in England aren't privacy, they're that it discriminates against those who refuse to get vaccinated.

>And you don't have to show your vaccine passport if you, um, never go outside again.

You'd have to show your vaccine passport if you want to partake in proportionately high risk activities where you not only have risk to yourself, but you also pose a risk to others. And it's [almost] always places you have to take ID anyway, to prove your age.

Why should those who chose to not do the socially responsible thing of getting vaccinated, get to amplify the risk to those who do?

What's ironic is that people who usually call out slippery slope as being a fallacy are participating in the fallacy of cherry-picking. Because slippery slope is only a fallacy when there is no prior evidence of the proposed events occurring, and 99.9% of the time people say "that's a slippery slope", it's in response to events that are similar to past events.

The ends justifies the means right?

Either way, everyone should get the vaccine for the health benefit when they actually acquire covid (when not if). The better outcomes are without question, but what is questionable is the rate of spread, especially of delta and the new... is it called lambda(?) variant.

We need to be honest about this: the benefit of the vaccine is clear due to the milder outcomes across even low risk groups. That itself makes it worth it.

Haven't read your link yet but I'd expect a double vaccinated 65 year old is still waaaaay more vulnerable than an unvaccinated 18 year old.

Delta has an R value of 8. That makes it one of the most infectious diseases we know about. Future variants are likely to be even more contagious. (That's the evolutionary pattern we see in other diseases.) Even if universal vaccination were to somewhat reduce the R value, the R value would remain above the critical threshold value of 1.0 regardless --- because R starts out so high naturally. We know R is above one post-vaccination because highly-vaccinated places like Iceland and Gibraltar see COVID waves despite near-universal vaccination. If R is above one, everyone will get the virus sooner or later anyway no matter what, and we are not operating in the regime in which universal vaccination has the kind of large positive externalities that might justify a universal vaccination program for other diseases (e.g. measles).

It's only large positive externalities that can justify state intervention in individual health. (The 1905 SCOTUS case that people have been citing discusses the issue in detail.) Current COVID vaccines, due to the R-value threshold effect, don't have the large positive externalities attached to previous vaccines.

As an analogy: a leather jacket might reduce a bullet's velocity to some extent, but that bullet will still penetrate and kill you. Nothing short of body armor that can actually stop the bullet is effective. Likewise, unless the vaccine can reduce R below 1 --- and no current COVID vaccine can do that --- universal vaccination cannot stop the spread of the disease.

The vaccines may be beneficial, but being beneficial, by itself, doesn't present a case for coercive state action. If it did, we'd probably all eat healthier and exercise more --- and we'd be less free as a people.

There are real social and economic costs to creating a "papers, please!" culture and setting a precedent for state intervention in individual medical choices. As it stands, the low risk posed by COVID and the insufficiency of current vaccines can't the coercive state programs being proposed around the world.

All I was saying is a policy supported by a large majority, proposed by this government, had to be walked back because of their inability to control the back benches. Boris is a piss poor leader.

The media and the government forces the false dichotomy on people. They say you’re either all-in surveillance state or you’re antivax. It’s part of their design.

Why would someone that is healthy risk ending up like that dead BBC presenter and leave their family behind for complete strangers?

Who gives you(or anyone) the right to decide what risks they should take and that their lives are worth less than anyone elses?

My mother is healthy even though she's almost 70 and she didn't have it. It's her choice. My wife didn't have it.It's her choice. Then again, she's in perfect health and 30 so for her the risks are next to none.

Small sacrifice? How about lock down the "vulnerable" like me(or worse) then and not screw up everyone else?

Just like the anti-vaccine/science people think any sacrifice they have to make is too much?

God forbid you’d do something that helps your fellow man instead of yourself.

Not sure why you’d want to suppress that truth. It’s just a little vague on how big the chances are.

Last week Portugal was number 2, and our cases have been dropping (which is a good sign for winter, though it's still early), also deaths and hospitalizations are nowhere near pre-vaccine numbers.

We even had breakthrough cases in homes and care centers for the elderly, the majority seem to be mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic, very few deaths.

Uh, where did I say that people shouldn't decide? Do you think we got +80% (87% if you factor in single doses), at gun point?

If these passports had an influence on 5 percentual points I was being extremely generous.

It's all about education, being informed, and a sense of duty. Probably the majority where fearful and anxious to do it, but they did it anyway.

> tourists are the lifeblood of many places, and they should be welcomed.

Being welcoming doesn't mean put up with shit, right? Wear a mask and have the vaccine passport at hand, not that hard now is it?

One is a tiny piece of cloth, the other is a tiny piece of digital paper.

This is factually incorrect.

The Covid-19 vaccines significantly reduce symptoms, risk of hospitalisation, risk of death, and transmission rate. They are worth it on balance if you care about your own health, and/or the health of other people you interact with, especially those close to you, for almost everyone above a fairly low age.

But they do not provide complete immunity, which is called "sterilising immunity".

Which means other people's behaviour still affects you.

Some vaccines for other diseases do provide sterilising immunity. For example the smallpox vaccine does, which is why that disease is pretty much eradicated. But unfortunately none of the vaccines currently available for Covid-19 provide sterilising immunity.

Even so, if we are able to dampen the transmission rate in each community to below R < 1 by a combination of measures, which includes vaccination, the disease will gradually fade away instead of spreading to everyone. Probabilities are everything in this game.

Masks provide some protection against the spreading of liquid droplets, as it says on the box. (Quality of mask varies a lot, though.)

In the case of Covid-19, droplets are believed to be the primary way it is suspended in air and breathed in by the next person.

Although that type of mask doesn't protect against pure airborne virus transmission without droplets, that is more applicable to other viruses than Covid-19.

The key difference: "Airborne virus" means virus without droplets (or such tiny ones that it's not what we mean by droplets); it does not mean the same thing as virus carried by small liquid droplets of the size normally breathed out by humans, and attenuated by cloth masks.

Maybe some Covid-19 is transported without droplets, but quantity of exposure matters, and suppressing droplet transmission, as done by good cloth masks, still has a significant effect. There are better, more thorough mask types available, of course.

Daily deaths (which is the best proxy we have for hospitalization) is nowhere near any of the peaks we have had in the last year and a half.

If somehow deaths are down but hospital capacity is also down, that is the fault of the hospitals, not the vaccinated. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

The media and public create that public brand; the health rep is generally just doing their job. In my state, the relevant person happens to have a recognisable hairstyle. It's not like she has a PR team going out telling people to dress as her for halloween or parties, people just do things like that, then the media covers that, and people send the link around and on it goes. Given the intense reactions that are the norm around this pandemic, I'm sure she'd feel safer without that level of attention.

If you build in a system where the government can extract profit by not complying with their actions, what makes you think you wont someday find yourself on the wrong side of those actions?

Keep in mind, your side might not always be the one in control and once you hand over extra power to the government it's extremely rare for them to hand it back to you.

Vaccinated people are more prone to be asymptomatic when infected, which means they are less likely to notice the infection, thus less likely to isolate and go into quarantine.

This is made even worse by the fact how a whole bunch of countries have stopped testing vaccinated people, they are just assumed healthy and not contagious by default.

Now throw in vaccinated people demanding to be exempt from pandemic measures, like not having to wear masks anymore and being allowed into crowded venues, and vaccinated people have the biggest potential to become the new super spreaders.

Do you know of a hospital system that’s overloaded in the way you are worried about? I’ve seen plenty of bloggers who talk about this, but they never seem to actually link to the data backing up their stories.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/08/06/fully-v...

Those hospitals at 90%: what is their base load? The hospitals with no beds: what is their base load?

These things make very profitable news articles, but they don’t do a very good job of informing.

For example, a care home in London recently held a trip, all individuals in attendance were 'double jabbed', and were required to bring a negative PCR test. The attendees were not allowed to board the coach if they did not bring a negative PCR test. Attendees also had their temperatures taken before bording the coach and were also asked about how they felt, and encouraged not to come should they even feel like they have any symptom/s. The next day, a member of staff tests positive.

Simply being double jabbed isn't a solution, because the vaccine, fundamentally, doesn't work the way you think.

Whilst a jab may remove some affects of Covid, it does not stop transmission; Covid can and will be passed from those who are vaccinated to vulnerable people regardless. This results in a quandry where advocating for proof of a negative test can not actually be proof of a negative test, and being double jabbed does not stop an individual from catching Covid and stopping them from suffering.

Forcing people to be jabbed is unethical; boys have been reported to be 6x more likely to suffer vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid. What groups are deemed more precious? Are our young boys worth sacrificing, or should we sacrifice those who's age is greater than the average age of death?

Excluding people from society because they are not willing to take a drug which is still experimental; The CDC may have approved it, but in the UK has not its approval is temporary and that lasts one year:(https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4759).

It also quite frightening to hear power hungry individuals advocating agency over anothers body; I find your comment regarding Texas ironic given the current abortion issues present, but perhaps you agree with that removal as well.

When rights are removed, they do not come back. we still remove our shoes when travelling through airport security. It is important that we consider the our actions and implications for the long term, not just the current political cycle.