A vaccine passport? Please hold, you’re 190th in the queue
HOLYROOD is back and the first big stooshie of the new parliamentary term has been over vaccine passports. Not over the principle, obviously, because that would describe a grown-up politics based on the issues. No, the scuttlebutt doing the rounds at the bottom of the Royal Mile is all about whether newly minted Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater have been stiffed by the SNP within the first 48 hours of taking office.
The Greens have been opposed to vaccine passports – with Harvie warning they would ‘deepen discrimination’, make social inequality worse and could ‘set a dangerous precedent, that people’s civil rights would be dependent on their medical history’.
Bound by Ministerial collective responsibility, if Harvie wants to keep his new job, office, staff and £30k uplift in pay, he’ll dutifully park his principles and vote along with the Government in the certain belief that his vote is a vote to deepen discrimination.
The SNP, too, were deeply dismissive of the concept of vaccine passports. When the UK Government introduced such passes for certain events around a month ago, Deputy First Minister John Swinney was rolled out to rubbish the idea, saying vaccine passports were ‘the wrong way to go’.
Fast forward a few weeks, and what was unconscionable in the rest of the UK is now not just palatable but advisable in Scotland, too. Who knew?
In truth, whether vaccine passports are a way of reducing risk while returning to normal or an infringement of medical freedom (and there’s a strong argument that says they’re both and this is a balance of principle and practicality), it was clear a system would be needed. As soon as countries started using Covid vaccination certificates as an entry requirement, so a domestic need would follow.
That’s why I can’t understand the SNP’s failure to create a more user friendly system. In other countries – indeed, other countries in the UK – there are multiple options. A digital version can be sent via email or downloaded as a pdf. A QR code for your smartphone can be downloaded instantly with the NHS app.
In Scotland, patients have been directed since May to request a paper letter which should be sent out in 14 days. It’s fair to say this system is under some stress – I called mid-morning on Thursday to request a copy on behalf of my parents and was allocated slot 190 in the queuing system. It took until the end of July for the Scottish Government to commission a Danish firm to develop a digital vaccine passport similar to those in use elsewhere in the UK and Europe. That was some time after Scottish travellers abroad reported being refused entry as they could not produce digital QR codes required in some countries, like France.
Only on Friday – after the schools went back and opportunities for families to travel were reduced – was a QR code system unveiled for Scotland. How it has taken six months from the introduction of a patient-access vaccine record system to create a digital and EUcompliant one, I don’t know.
THE SNP approach to vaccine passports feels slapdash and disjointed. New rules unveiled by Nicola Sturgeon this week, and set to be voted on in Holyrood in a few days’ time, now require such vaccine passports for Scots to access nightclubs and large gatherings such as concerts and football matches. But operators being asked to implement the changes say they haven’t been consulted and have been left in the dark.
The boss of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, Colin Wilkinson, asked the seemingly simple question: ‘What is a nightclub?’ But it matters. With hundreds of hybrid venues providing drinking and dancing – including bars, restaurants and hotels – when do proprietors get told if the new rules apply to them?
And all this assumes that the technology works. According to SNP backbencher John Mason, that may be an assumption too far.
The MSP took to social media to vent his frustration – ‘Just checked my vaccine status again. Still only showing one dose though I’ve had two. Second dose was on 31st May. Phoned on 16th July and 12th August and they said it would be corrected but no changes so far.’
If even Nicola Sturgeon’s own colleagues can’t get the system to work, what hope for the rest of us?