Futile pursuit of avoiding risk

 

 
For the second column in a row, I find myself writing critically of another Government initiative that threatens our fundamental freedoms.
 
Last month I offered a critique of the vast and catch-all nature of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
 
This time around, I'm worried about the Johnson administration's bizarre fixation with introducing 'Covid status certificates' or vaccine passports. The broad idea - the Government has been rather evasive in providing details - is that entry to certain types of mass gatherings, such as sporting events, would be dependent on having a valid vaccine passport.
 
The objective is to reduce the incidences of COVID19 by allowing only holders of these passports to participate in such mass gatherings.
 
My initial concern is one of principle, as these passports would take away at a stroke the rights of English people to go about their lawful business as they see fit.
The always exemplary Toby Young put this fundamental objection very succinctly in a recent Spectator article: It’s an inversion of the Common Law principle that everything should be permitted unless the law specifically prohibits it. Under this scheme, I am only allowed to do something if permitted to do so by law."
 
In practical terms the proposal is increasingly unnecessary - made so by the ever-growing success of the vaccine rollout programme. The whole point of this was to achieve herd immunity as quickly as possible. It looks as if the necessary percentage of the population needed to have COVID19 antibodies will be reached by mid-summer, probably much sooner.
 
Even at the present time, the recent surveys suggest that Covid-19 antibodies are present in about 55 per cent of the UK population – rising to 85 per cent of pensioners.
 
Vaccine passports are also discriminatory as they will directly impact on those sections of our society that, for any number of reasons, are more vaccine-hesitant than most.
This could lead to a segregation of our society whereby some of the UK’s minority ethnic communities might find themselves less likely to be allowed into large, communal events than others.
 
Of course, there is always the option for someone to demonstrate that they're not an infection risk by taking getting a PCR test. But these cost at least £120 a go. Someone hoping to visit different sporting events would have to take a test before each fixture, pushing this out of reach of all but a small minority of sports fans.
 
They may well also be unworkable over any length of time, as the experience of Israel shows. There, in spite of a cultural acceptance of the use of identity cards, evidence is emerging that many business owners have neither the ability nor the inclination to police customers at their doors in this way over any length of time.
 
But there is something even more fundamentally wrong about vaccine passports. They reflect the unyielding temptation of Government, unless constantly held in check, to encroach into more and more aspects of everyday life in the futile pursuit of avoiding risk.
 
Life has always been about risk, or rather the many hundreds of conscious or unconscious decisions we take each day based on assessing the risk of us coming to harm as we pursue what we intend.
 
Crossing the road involves risk. Drinking alcohol involves risk. Flying to another country (when that was indeed possible) involves risk.
 
Yet, this Government seems to be on a crusade to reduce the risk of catching COVID19 to zero - which scientifically might not be possible, not least with the many variants & mutations that are occurring at present.
 
I was most disappointed to read in a recent article by my fellow columnist for this paper, Bishop Martin Seely, a similar pursuit of this impossible objective.
 
Under the headline 'Help is coming to quell risk', Bishop Martin offered us these words: "the whole world needs to be vaccinated to bring us all to a point where we can live with COVID19."
 
Yet this is in contradiction to both evidence that the current vaccines may do little to reduce the spread of the virus among younger people & children and the fact that herd immunity levels are usually considerably less than 100%.
 
The cost of such a goal is the long-term diminution of our freedoms and the chances that our society and economy returning to anything like 'normal'.
 
And that is a cost too far, surely?

First published in the www.suffolkfreepress.co.uk & www.dissexpress.co.uk Thursday, April 29, 2021.