The Times - UK (2021-12-06)

Biden must resist joining

Putin’s poker game

Edward Lucas

Page 26

Don’t make martyrs of ignorant antivaxers

Compulsory vaccination against Covid would glorify the cause of the refuseniks but passports could win them over

Comment

Vaccine passports not only protect

the vaccinated, they can help

persuade the unvaccinated. The

introduction of the pass sanitaire in

France was a huge gamble in a

fiercely sceptical nation; 100,000

people took to the streets in protest.

Yet the gamble paid off. France’s

vaccination rate has surged. In the

24 hours after President Macron

announced that passes would soon be

required for public venues, a million

people made an appointment. Before

the health pass, only 54 per cent of

the French population had received

their first dose. Just five months on

the figure is 75 per cent.

Vaccine passports are a sensible

idea, so sensible they were

government policy a few months

ago, but true to form the government

has U-turned on them after

grumbling from backbench rebels

and the hospitality industry. It needs

to think again. According to the Sage

scientific committee, this virus will

be knocking around for at least

another five years. We need to work

out a way to live with it as

harmoniously as possible, a way that

respects refuseniks’ right to do what

they want with their bodies, while

also respecting the wishes of the

vaccinated majority not to be

exposed to Covid unnecessarily.

However maddening we find

refuseniks, let us not look lovingly at

Europeans’ enforcement of vaccines;

let us not even glance in that

direction. Vaccine passports are the

best long-term answer. The

government must get on and

introduce them.

freedom just comes with caveats, as

it often does. You are free to work in

a nursery, but only if you have a DBS

check. You are free to drive, but only

if you have a licence. You are free to

travel to certain countries, but only if

you have a yellow fever vaccination.

We are not forced to learn to drive,

or undertake criminal record checks,

or get jabbed, but many will choose

to do so to access what they want.

While vaccine passports might deny

people certain pleasures and

experiences, they still preserve free

choice and bodily autonomy, which

mandatory vaccination does not.

This seems to me a perfectly

sensible, proportionate public health

measure. After all, the law already

protects us from other people’s

potentially deadly cigarette smoke

indoors; why then shouldn’t it from

others’ potentially deadly breath?

A strident “tribe” have protested at

jabs and spread conspiracy theories

Ratched type wielding a syringe, the

word “compulsory” does not sit

happily with “injection” in the

21st century. Aside from the obvious

concerns about bodily autonomy, the

problem with compulsory

vaccinations is that by “persecuting”

this group of people, as the

antivaxers would surely brand it,

governments risk glorifying the

cause, creating martyrs with every

jab, fine and prison sentence.

The pertinent difference between

2021 and 1853 is that today we have

daily word riots on social media to

inflame opinion and fuel paranoia.

Already many antivaxers see

themselves as part of a tribe, proudly

standing apart from the credulous

mainstream; mandatory vaccination

would only build higher walls around

that tribe. Antivaxers trying to evade

the legally mandated needle might

take on some of the romance of

resistance fighters, drawing more

teens and twentysomethings to

their cause.

Compulsory vaccination is, in

short, a very bad idea. But if that

approach is too hard, the UK’s

present one is too soft. Our most

significant policy on this front is that

care-home workers must be fully

vaccinated, which considering the

vulnerability of the elderly to Covid

is a no-brainer. Aside from this,

government policy seems to be to

simply exhort people to get jabbed.

But with about 10 per cent of adults

still holding off from vaccinations,

this clearly isn’t enough.

Between authoritarian and laissez

faire, hard and soft, there is a middle

way: vaccine passports. Don’t want to

be jabbed? Fine — just forfeit your

right to access sporting events, music

concerts, some shops and hospitality

venues. Whatever civil libertarians

might squawk, no one’s freedom is

threatened by this measure; that

F

unny, isn’t it, how those
unvaccinated Covid patients
in our hospitals reject the
wisdom of medical science
one day and fall on its mercy
the next. Over the weekend figures
emerged showing that more than
90 per cent of Covid sufferers
requiring the most specialist care are
unvaccinated. Three quarters of those
in intensive care beds have not been
jabbed. The casualties of antivaccine
sentiment are not just antivaxers or
those they infect, but all those whose
operations are delayed or
examinations postponed. That
someone’s demented belief in Bill-
Gates-Ate-My-Hamster conspiracy
theories might actually harm another
person’s health is maddening. “Live
and let live,” shrug the antivaxers;
yup, until it’s live and let die.
Vaccine refuseniks’ combination of
ignorance and arrogance is so
irritating that we might look
wistfully at the approach they are
taking on the Continent. In Austria
compulsory vaccinations start in
February. In Greece all unvaccinated
over-60s are to be fined €100 a
month. Now Germany looks set to
vote on the issue and Olaf Scholz,
the next chancellor, is confident that
mandatory vaccination will begin in
early spring. Last week Ursula von der
Leyen, the president of the European
Commission, opened a discussion on
“how we can encourage and
potentially think about mandatory
vaccination within the EU. This
needs a common approach.”

Though this may sound appealing

to those at the end of their tether

with antivaxers, there is a line

between sensible policies to protect

the vaccinated and self-defeating

policies that will do more harm than

good, and our European friends are

fast leaping over it.

In defence of von der Leyen et al,

historical perspective renders

mandatory vaccination a little less

alarming. Spool back a hundred and

fifty-odd years, to a time when

smallpox was “filling the churchyards

with corpses” in the words of the

historian Thomas Macaulay. Given

that the “speckled monster” killed a

third of victims and left a third of

survivors blind, you might have

imagined a grateful public leaping on

Edward Jenner’s vaccination. Not so;

widespread scepticism about the

smallpox vaccine led to the

Vaccination Act of 1853, which stated

that every baby had to be vaccinated

within three months of birth.

The uproar was immense, with

riots and effigies of Jenner burning

in the streets. But the government

persisted and now the speckled

monster is history. With the benefit

of hindsight, does compulsory

vaccination against smallpox look

like the act of an authoritarian and

sinister state or the act of a forward-

thinking and sensible one?

Seen through this lens, the

Europeans’ move towards

compulsory vaccination is at least

understandable rather than sinister.

But it is still the wrong approach.

Though no one will actually be

pinned to a gurney by some Nurse

Effigies of Jenner were

burnt in the street over

his smallpox vaccine

Between authoritarian

and laissez faire there

is a middle way

Clare

Fo ge s

@clarefoges

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