Not ‘appy’ about NHS passports
JWELL hallelujah! This week the man the media jocularly calls Professor Lockdown, aka Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, told Radio 4 that, “The data is very encouraging and very much in line with what we expected.”
Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey. Imperial is the body behind the most relentlessly pessimistic modelling since the pandemic began in the UK and Ferguson has told us again and again the outlook is “bleak”.
Despite the fantastically successful vaccine programme, he predicted Boris’s roadmap to freedom would result in a third wave this summer, with more hospitalisations than in the first peak last April.
I would say he and his college have been responsible for an enormous amount of unnecessary anguish and dread, and when the inevitable inquiry kicks in, I hope Ferguson’s fearmongering is taken into account.
But now the man has metaphorically eaten his hat, it’s hi-ho silver lining.
Freedom’s nearly here, the traffic lights are a’changin’ and, green or amber, we’re all going on
Ra summer holiday, as long as we’re vaccinated. I don’t buy the moral argument that vaccine passports are unfair to the young because they’re not yet double jabbed.
A negative Covid test will get them into European holiday resorts, and anyway they’ve got years ahead of them to travel.
Time is short for us oldies.We need the sun and we need it now.
But here’s the rub, and it’s so unfair, as my teenage kids used to moan.
Bloody technology. It’s a nightmare for many boomers, especially me. To get a vaccination passport it looks like we’ll have to download the NHS app on our smartphones (if we have them).
So I tried last weekend, and what a kerfuffle. You need to photograph your passport, then scan your face. Hopeless. So instead I had to video myself speaking a code number. Disaster.
Today I had an email saying they can’t find me. As far as the National Health Service is concerned, I don’t exist.
Do you think they’ll allow medieval scrolls instead? Otherwise I won’t be going on holiday this summer after all.