Vaccine passports are not helping

Larry Wartels Victoria

I was astounded to hear that Dr. Bonnie Henry was extending the use of vaccine passports. In my Jan. 6 column, I pointed out that, in the month before the Omicron virus began its upward spiral, fully vaccinated Canadians were both contracting and spreading the Delta variant.

In mid-December, Ontario (the only province that reports by vaccination status) reported 809 fully vaccinated Delta variant cases. And all of those people had been issued vaccine passports.

It’s now clear that Omicron’s spread is unrelated to vaccination status. In a Dec. 22 interview, Henry stated that Omicron’s ease of transmission means “it is very likely over time that all of us will have exposure to this variant.”

We now see from reports from South Africa and the Europe that Omicron offers a path to herd immunity with relatively little serious illness.

A study published in the journal Nature found that many people who have recovered from SARs-CoV-2 will make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives.

This “natural immunity” effect is comparable to that developed for measles and other viral diseases. That explains why EU countries are issuing “digital certificates of recovery,” giving those who have previously tested positive for COVID19 the same status as fully vaccinated, without requiring future booster shots.

Meanwhile, in British Columbia, the recovered are treated the same as unvaccinated. And the useless and misleading vaccine cards that almost all other countries have eliminated are being dredged up by a public health officer who claims to ‘”follow the science.”

Gwyn Morgan Victoria