ARE vaccine passports a good idea? Were they ever a good idea? Could they be a good idea in Scotland, where we’re getting them, but not in England where, after humming and hawing, the government has decided against?

On the basic point of their desirability, there should be a general presumption against them, as there should be on anything where the state imposes a restriction on your liberty. In this it’s a bit like voter ID, an unnecessary and illiberal solution to a non-existent problem – if there’s electoral fraud, for which there’s precious little evidence, it’s almost all in postal votes. After the last general election, there were just four convictions for fraudulent voting, and only two of them were for people pretending to be someone else at a polling station.

Cheeringly, liberty was one of Sajid Javid’s points when he announced, over the weekend, that England wouldn’t be bringing vaccine passports in (at least, not yet). “We shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it, or because others are doing it,” he told Nick Robinson, in a refreshing return to the kind of attitude that Tories used to profess more or less automatically.

But if that’s the default position, you have to take into account the fact that these are hardly normal times. The powers with which the Westminster and Scottish governments have equipped themselves would normally be not only undesirable but intolerable, yet most of us accept them, since the fact that the pandemic has already killed more than 134,000 people in the UK makes the dangers clear enough.

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If we ignore the civil liberties aspect of vaccine passports, it’s because we assume the circumstances merit it. Of course, some people don’t accept that, but it seems to be the majority position.

There’s then the practical question about what purpose they serve. Some of that isn’t in either government’s control; international travel, for example, was always likely to mean that people would need a way to demonstrate their vaccination status. That’s one reason why apps or papers could be useful, even if intrusive. It’s probably also why so many people were prepared to countenance them, just as they were prepared to sign up to tracing apps, and are often still wearing masks even in places where it’s no longer compulsory.

But it’s not a knock-out case for making them mandatory. For everyday, domestic things – public transport, nightclubs, sporting events – the rationale for documentation has always been slightly odd: if vaccines work, and most of the population has been vaccinated, there’s not much of a case for them; conversely, if vaccines didn’t work, or weren’t especially effective, there would be no point to them, either.

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics give us a definitive answer about the vaccines’ effectiveness against dying of Covid. In England, there were 51,281 deaths involving coronavirus in the first six months of this year, of which just 640 were in people fully vaccinated – and that includes those who were infected before vaccination. If you limit it to those who tested positive after they had had their second dose, just 256 died, fewer than one in every 200.

Since more than 80 per cent of the UK’s population have had both doses (and 89 per cent of over-16s at least the first), these are heartening statistics. But they also render vaccine passports pretty well redundant, because vaccination – while it makes your chances of surviving coronavirus very good indeed – doesn’t prevent infection or transmission.

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When Scottish nightclubs start demanding them next month, the (apparently absurd) regulatory position will be that you can gain admission if you’ve got Covid, but can prove you’ve had your jags, but won’t get in if you don’t have Covid, but can’t prove you’ve been vaccinated.

But until the Health Secretary’s interview on Sunday, Nadhim Zahawi, his under-secretary for Covid deployment, had been saying the UK government would bring them in. And even now, UK ministers are carefully saying that they still might, if circumstances change. That may look inconsistent, but it may simply be that – as with the decision about whether to vaccinate 12 to 15-year-olds – it’s a close call. And it leaves England with an additional option, in the event of surging cases, that is short of a return to full-blown lockdown.

It may well be that vaccine passports were always pointless, because by the time it was possible to introduce them, they would be redundant or ineffective. But that would also explain why the UK government gave the impression that they were a likely measure, right up until the point where they had to make a decision. Because whether there’s a good case for vaccine passports or not, there was a very good one for the threat of them, in that they may have chivvied people into getting their jags.

When UK government plans for vaccine passports for nightclubs, which were to start at the end of September, were announced in late July, there was some mockery of the apparent illogicality of the proposal. Why say a measure is necessary, but not bring it in for another couple of months? Well, because at that stage it would have been the earliest date by which most young people could have had both jags. And, as it turned out, saying that they would be required may have resulted in the vast majority of them getting them.

But now that they have, the case for the passports themselves is weaker. That’s a minor headache for the Scottish government, which is now committed to measures that won’t apply elsewhere and may always have been of dubious value. Given that our case levels are so much higher than other parts of the UK and Europe, I imagine ministers are unlikely to change their minds about it any time soon, but it adds another difficulty to a measure that was going to be tricky to implement, anyway.

Getting ready to abandon them as soon as possible, however, ought to be the priority; to echo Mr Javid, we shouldn’t be doing something just because others are, but by the same token, we shouldn’t maintain a different stance from the rest of the UK just for the sake of distinction. It’s not just a question of whether they can be made to work, but whether they actually serve any purpose.

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