Will they, won’t they? Only yesterday the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was saying vaccine passports were ‘under consideration’ — going directly against what Nadim Zahawi said just days before when he ruled out vaccine passports as discriminatory and un-British.
Raab was clear that the UK was looking at both domestic and foreign passports: that as well as looking at the possibility of their use for flights and international travel, the British government is also investigating whether such a document could be used for vaccinated individuals wanting to go into a restaurant or visit the supermarket.
So what does Matt Hancock have to say on the subject? On the Today programme just now, the Health Secretary muddied the waters even further: while the UK was looking at a foreign vaccine passport, he ruled out a domestic immunology certificate. Hancock told listeners:
We don’t have any plans to introduce [vaccine passports] at home… if another country decides to require it then obviously you need to be able to show, through the NHS, you’ve had the jab.
So now the Health Secretary has contradicted the Foreign Secretary’s contradiction of the vaccine minister. Given a Monday night No. 10 press conference is on the cards so that Boris Johnson can reap the vaccine roll-out glory, perhaps he could clear up the confusion over vaccine passports? Or perhaps we can expect yet more confusion…
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