“We will trust the judgement of the British people,” United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson proclaimed as he stripped away the country’s mask mandate, vaccine passport, and other Covid restrictions.
His remarks in the House of Commons offered a rare glimmer of hope not only for Britons, but for people around the world, that normalcy is still within reach.
But that was Wednesday. On Thursday, Austria’s parliament adopted a draconian bill making vaccination mandatory, while the government of Ontario in Canada unveiled a “reopening” roadmap which fails to remove vaccine passports and mask mandates at any point in it.
In Ontario, opposition parties aren’t criticizing the government for indefinitely extending vaccine passports. The Liberals are angry Ontarians will be able to go to restaurants and gyms with just two doses.
I asked Alberta Premier Jason Kenney last week to provide a target metric, if not a specific date, for scrapping vaccine passports and the province-wide mask mandate. He conceded he wants these “incredible intrusions” gone, but said it is “too early for us to plan for relaxation of measures at this point.”
Politically speaking, I understand Kenney’s caution. Last summer he declared Alberta open, only to sharply reverse course a few months later and impose the vaccine passports he’d previously sworn off. But I don’t buy that it can ever be “too early” to plan to eliminate measures born of an era that was only supposed to last two weeks.
I hope for the United Kingdom’s sake that Johnson’s approach holds. One can’t separate his reopening plan from the domestic political context: he’s facing a mounting leadership challenge in part due to his own government’s refusal to abide by the myriad restrictions it imposed on ordinary citizens. That said, I won’t reject the right outcome even if comes about for the wrong reasons.
This isn’t a sign we’re turning the page on the pandemic, as Britain is proving to be an outlier. European news outlets have bombarded readers in the past week of countries shedding their Covid restrictions and moving to view the virus as endemic.
Spain now says Covid will be treated like other illnesses and is on track to lift restrictions. Come February, France is easing restrictions as well. They may be lifting some things, but they’re doubling down on their most severe measures – the vaccine passports.
This not only means their “reopenings” only apply to some of their citizens, but also that they view vaccine segregation as a part of the new normal.
“Learn to live with Covid” was supposed to mean exercising standard health precautions and accepting that the world is not without risk. For governments, it now means we must submit to the permanence of oppressive vaccine passport regimes and conditional freedoms.
The bill passed by Austria’s parliament Thursday makes Covid vaccines mandatory until January 31, 2024. That’s more than two years from now, which may qualify as “temporary” in the word’s literal sense, but not in any substantive way.
While Austria will recognize natural immunity from Covid in lieu of vaccination, it will only do that for 180 days after infection, meaning everyone will be forced to get the jab at some point.
Waiting out the pandemic isn’t a winning strategy either, as the government’s commentary accompanying the legislation says even if the WHO declares the pandemic to be over, Austria still has an interest in enforcing mandatory vaccination to prevent a localized epidemic. In any event, the World Health Organization has no definitive criteria for declaring a pandemic’s move to endemic, which is convenient for those who don’t want that point to come.
The fine of up to 3,600 euros can be levied quarterly, with imprisonment an option for those unable or unwilling to pay.
The Austrian law is extreme, but a harbinger of how far supposedly liberal countries are prepared to go – and how little opposition they’ll find when they go there.
As Dutch lawyer Eva Vlaardingerbroek put it, the fear is that the vaccine passport will not remain a standalone pass, but part of the European Union’s push to European Digital Identity Wallets, “personal digital wallets allowing citizens to digitally identify themselves, store and manage identity data and official documents in electronic format.”
This initiative has been a particular pet project of the European Commission and the World Economic Forum for quite some time, but the pandemic evidently offered a convenient enough excuse to move forward with it.
Governments are not in the business of abrogating power or dismantling institutions. They are creating infrastructure that will almost certainly outlive the pandemic, so don’t let them create it in the first place.
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