Patrick Christys: Scrapping of Covid vaccine passports a victory for common sense

It’s been announced that plans to introduce vaccine passports have been scrapped. Great news for everyone who was against a papers please society.

I’ve never quite understood the point of a vaccine passport – it is a document that shows you can still contract Covid and pass it on. So it’s about as useful as Neville Chamberlain’s Peace for Our Time paper that of course, ended so well for the people of Czechoslovakia and indeed the rest of Europe.

It’s a victory for common sense and I think we should enjoy that for a moment. But there are some serious questions this now raises such as – were we being lied to all along.

Boris Johnson told backbench Tory MPs two months ago that vaccine passports may not actually come into fruition, and Dominic Raab actually said in July that they were simply being used to coax the young into getting jabbed.

Well, hang on a minute, this now means that anybody who only got the jab because they believed that they wouldn’t be allowed to go about their daily lives if they didn’t has essentially been coerced into putting something into their bodies by the government.

That’s scary stuff.

I know people, and I’m one of them, who only got the jab because I thought that if I didn’t then I might not be allowed to come to work, I might not be allowed to go into cafes, bars, nightclubs, museums, potentially on public transport, who knew where it would end.

So I now feel like the state lied to me in order to trick me into putting something into my body. Because that’s what happened. Isn’t that a bit grim?

I’ve got to be honest, I’ve had no side effects from the vaccine and I’m so happy it exists, but I don’t like the idea of coercion and I think that’s where we are.

There’s another reason why I think it’s reasonable to suggest that Boris was telling porkies all along – he’s essentially been led by the opinion polls all along. He loves poles more than someone with a Spearmint Rhino loyalty card.

Depending on what poll you look at, between two thirds and three quarters of Brits have been in favour of vaccine passports throughout the pandemic.

I mean, I believe you can trust polls about as much as you can trust a high pressure double glazing salesman, but they’re all we’ve got to go off so hey ho.

So if Boris was true to form then surely he’d be introducing them – but he isn’t, and that implies he never intended to.

It now raises a serious question about trust in this government. When they say they’re going to do something, like vaccine passports, and then it emerges they probably never had any intention of doing so, that’s a problem. And then they say they won’t do something, like hike NI, and they do, that’s a problem.

Having said that, it’s probably still better than old Captain Hindsight on the other side of the Commons benches, can you imagine if Keir Starmer had led us through this pandemic? We’d still be waiting for him to make his mind up about whether or not we spend Christmas with our relatives. In fact, we should probably promote Sir Keir from Captain Hindsight to Major Indecision, Colonel Cock-up and right through to General Disaster.

Anyway, we should enjoy the moment – vaccine passports are a thing of the past apparently. A victory for common sense. Well done everyone who stood firm. But it shouldn’t detract from the fact that this government was content to try to play Big Brother with our bodily autonomy.