When the Prime Minister mentioned ‘Covid status certification’ as part of his route back to normal life, one man must have enjoyed the moment. For Tony Blair it was yet one more little victory in his UK comeback tour, made all the sweeter because Boris Johnson was once a principal opponent of the idea of any ID card system.
Blair has been pushing vaccine passports like nobody’s business. A recent paper published by his Institute for Global Change advocated that we carry ‘digital health passports’ on our smartphones, which we could scan on entry to bars, theatres and other places. If you don’t have a smartphone, the paper suggested, the venue could take a photo of you instead, and check it against a database of people who have been vaccinated. ‘The public is increasingly comfortable with the trade-off between protecting our civil liberties and protecting our health,’ it asserted, going on to list several apps and app developers which it claims are already working on suitable products.
Early last month, Blair appeared on the airwaves advocating that the government delay second jabs so as to speed up the delivery of first injection. The practice became government policy soon afterwards, in spite of Pfizer warning that there was no data to show the efficacy of its vaccine other than for a system of two doses, three weeks apart.
Then there was mass testing. Blair first raised the possibility of testing ‘virtually everybody’ in an interview with Sky News on 29 March last year. His institute proceeded to put out a series of reports advocating mass regular testing. One of them, from July, implored the government ‘to foster collaboration between partners and to introduce “moonshots” — high-risk, high-reward innovations that don’t yet exist but which would change the game on testing’. The wording is intriguing because six weeks later the Prime Minister launched ‘Operation Moonshot’ — a mass testing regime that would see the entire population tested at regular intervals.
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