Vaccine passports: passage to purgatory

Boris Johnson is facing yet another Tory rebellion after a minister said vaccine passports could be introduced in a variety of contexts, including sporting and business events, music venues, festivals and potentially churches and other places of worship – in addition to nightclubs.
 
Making a statement in the Commons, Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, confirmed the plans, telling MPs: “At the end of September, we plan to make full vaccination a condition of entry to those high-risk settings where large crowds gather and interact”. 
 
Under the new plans, people will need to show that they are fully vaccinated to enter venues deemed to be high-risk, meaning that proof of a negative test will no longer be sufficient. Zahawi said the government “reserves the right” to make vaccine passports mandatory in some settings.

This morning, Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, said an expected vote on the policy might only touch on the “concept” of their use – but that he was confident the government would win the expected vote with a majority of 80.

Other reports suggest his confidence is premature. More than 40 Conservatives have signed a declaration by campaign group Big Brother Watch saying they are opposed to using “Covid status certification to deny individuals access to general services, businesses or jobs” – and The Guardian reports that more Tory MPs have private intentions to rebel.
 
Conservative MPs Steve Baker and Mark Jenkinson have also announced a boycott of the Conservative Party conference, which requires a Covid passport for entrance, with Jenkinson tweeting: “I won’t be going to conference if we’re excluding people on the basis of their vaccination status.” See The Hound below.
 
Labour has said it would side with the rebels in voting down the vaccine passports scheme, describing it as “costly, open to fraud” and “impractical”, as well as potentially ineffective. This opposition to the policy is hardly surprising, considering Sajid Javid, the health secretary, tested positive for Covid this week – despite being double jabbed.
 
Then there is the concern about which specific events and venues will be classed as “high risk”. Earlier in the week, Paul Scully, the Consumer and Small Business Minister, told LBC that Number 10 was “not ruling out” vaccine passports for churches – a policy that religious leaders have previously warned would be “unethical”.
 
On a separate front, the government is still battling the ongoing backlash over the “pingdemic” after the latest NHS figures showed that a record 618,000 people were alerted by the NHS Covid app in England and Wales in one week.
 
According to Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium (BRC), this rise in alerts has created a “perfect storm” for supermarkets consisting of “summer labour shortages in the lead up to the reopening of the economy … and more and more people being asked to self-isolate.”
 
Supermarkets have warned the UK could face food shortages this summer unless the government works quickly to stop the slew of “pings” after thousands of employees were told to self-isolate by the NHS Covid app. 
 
Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Lidl are among the shops that have experienced poorly stocked aisles – but the BRC has told customers “there’s plenty of food in the country” and urged them not to panic buy.
 
To combat the growing furore, the Government has u-turned on its self-isolation policy and promised to publish a “very narrow” list of industries exempt from isolation rules later today.  
 
But as the images of empty shelves and warnings of stockpiling begin to fill out the news sites, the whole sorry situation feels like a bad case of déjà vu. 

Olivia Gavoyannis,
Reaction Reporter