As previously said, the whole shenanigan about corona passes, or QR codes how they are known around here (the Netherlands) starts to wear thin, with some voices raising concerns that were impossible to be raised less than 6 months ago. The government seems to loose control of the narrative, and they even put in place some sort or rudimentary damage control. What's this about?
The introduction of a 2G or 3G system – restricting access to events and locations on the basis of vaccination or test status – will not have much of an impact on the current surge in coronavirus cases, according to research carried out on behalf of the health ministry.
Government likes to play with these different flavors of access restrictions, like 2 or 3G, but in the end the message is clear: you're not vaccinated, you're denied a normal life. Is not quite a normal life right now, with lockdowns and closures of theaters, restaurants, cafes, and so on, so being vaccinated makes little difference from this point of view. And since these passes are set to expire after a given amount of months, this year the message will become: if you're not up-to-date with the vaccination, then you're excluded from society. And in case of a 2G system, it doesn't matter if you're tested negative. All that matters is vaccination.
And this makes no sense at all anymore. As of today, 86.2% of the adult population is fully vaccinated and a lot of them took the booster as well. Cases of Omicron are high, but the hospitalizations are keep on going down. The fearmongering pumped up by the media starts to be replaced by frustration and hate against idiotic measures. You can even read now that such systems are pretty much useless:
‘In the 2G concept, it is assumed that people who have not been vaccinated would then have fewer risky contacts, but that is not always the case,’ Mouter said. This does mean that the reduction in the infection rate in a 2G situation may well be less than 10% in practice.
The IG situation, in which everyone is tested for entry, would be more effective and cut the reproduction rate by 45% in a best-case scenario. But that too is not enough to cut the rate to under zero. ‘It is not possible to get the R rate below 1, however you use the coronavirus pass system,’ Mouter said.
So, what's the official reaction of this?
Health minister Ernst Kuipers said at Friday’s press conference he was waiting for the research results before deciding if to press ahead with legislation to introduce 2G.
So the new health minister was with his finger on the trigger, waiting for the result of the research to justify his actions. Unfortunately for him, the result was not quite what he was expected! Still, he doesn't oppose the discriminatory system, but he passes it to parliament:
Kuipers has not yet reacted to the research results in detail but said in a briefing he was sending the report to parliament...which would make 2G an option in the Netherlands.
His predecessor Hugo de Jonge, who backed a 2G strategy, said that a shift to 1G would be too expensive, and could cost €50m a week. I wrote already about this, here and here.
An article with the same content you can find at nltimes.nl: Stricter Covid access policy won't help against Omicron: study
The introduction of a 2G policy for coronavirus access passes makes no sense at this time. Researchers who studied various scenarios at the request of the Ministry of Public Health came to that conclusion. Controlling access based on vaccination, recovery, or testing negative does work, but excluding people who have not been vaccinated and haven't demonstrably recovered does not add much.
And what the prime minister Mark Rutte is saying:
We must work together on tolerance and equality
Kinda hypocritical, don't you find that? Now, I don't know if he refers to equally poor or something, but that's a discussion for another day.
And on top of all the above, the conclusion: any sort of discriminatory passes are using to teach the minority a lesson, for the majority to get the message. It's not about public health or anything like that, it's only about imposing vaccination as a normal way of life for the years to come.
It's in our power to stop this madness before it's too late.
