The UK government is not only considering coronavirus vaccine passports for air travel but also to simply gain access to public places such as shops and event venues. The news is quite surprising considering the government has, for months, denied any plans for vaccine passports.
In an interview at LBC radio, the UK’s foreign secretary Dominic Raab confirmed that the government was looking to introduce a system that would allow people who have received the COVID-19 jabs more freedom. “It’s under consideration, but of course you’ve got to make it workable,” Raab said.
“I’m not sure there’s a foolproof answer in the way that sometimes it’s presented, but of course we’ll look at all the options,” the foreign secretary added.
Raab’s remarks contradicts the vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi, who previously asserted that vaccine passports would result in discrimination. Also, a senior government official told The Telegraph that the government was being “very cautious about this idea that if you don’t have a passport therefore somehow your liberties are curtailed.”
“As conservatives, we should be instinctively concerned about that,” the Telegraph’s source added.
It seems the UK government is conflicted about vaccine passports. But, regardless of the obvious discrimination and privacy concerns, it has continued to work on vaccine passports.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair, the former prime minister is calling on the UK government to leverage its power to push for a standardized worldwide vaccine passport system.
“We should plan for an agreed passport now. The arguments against it really don’t add up,” Blair wrote in a column on the Daily Mail. In the article, the former prime minister revealed that he was supporting the World Economic Forum’s CommonPass Initiative, a vaccine passport system.
The CommonPass Initiative received significant funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and also has the support of a coalition of Big Tech companies. CommonPass is already being tested by the three biggest airline alliances.
Blair insisted that vaccine passports are the only way back to normalcy.
“With my team at the Institute for Global Change, I have looked at this from every angle and come to this conclusion: there is no prospect of a return to anything like normal without enabling people to show their Covid status, whether that means they have been vaccinated or recently tested,” Blair wrote in the article.
