I'm extremely pro-vaccine, and I've been very frustrated by the UK's reluctance to jab kids over the last six months, for instance.
But I'm also very anti-vaccine passes. There's precious little evidence that they make any difference whatever, and so the costs are just too high - costs of social division and also the worrying current tendency towards poorly evidenced authoritarian measures as a first resort for panicking governments.
Being seen to be doing something is a major driver for most of these measures imo.
Using them as an excuse not to do other things is part of the agenda. I dont intend to repeat past disagreements with you about all those other things and what good they do, things which we seem unlikely to see eye to eye on at any stage of this pandemic.
Social divisions and going way too far with coercion are issues for sure. What do you think about the current form of Englands passes where they added a test option as an alternative to vaccination?
Reasons the UK establishment are not doing much in the way of the positive encouragement things you mention include being cheap, lazy, disinterested and in denial. However there is also a very real programme to improve access, communication and to try to convince people the hard way. But this is often done at the local level or within specific communities, so itts often quite invisible to those of us who arent part of the communities in question and are getting most of the story via the media.
Some of the uptake rates have been consistently impressive, others are more depressing. Lack of accurate population figures makes it harder to know quite how bad uptake has been in some places, especially cities.
The UK authorities were jealous of the increased vaccine uptake the likes of France got after imposing such passes, but there are many differences between the countries and it didnt seem likely that we would properly replicate this here.
Another potential problem with the nature of this debate is that although the vaccines against this disease can carry a large amount of pandemic weight, people do tend to overplay in their minds the extent to which the unvaccinated are driving waves and hospitalisation figures. Things are often way more complex than that, especially when a variant like Omicron arrives that appears to gain a chunk of its advantage from its ability to target people who have had a range of prior exposure to other strains and have already had various combinations and timing of vaccines. Solving the issue of unvaccinated people will not instantly fix all the other issues and we still need to allow some stuff other than vaccines to carry some of the pandemic weight, at least at this stage.
