Vaccine passports a reality check

So the future is here suddenly. Or rather, it’s on its way, but maybe only after a potentially chaotic few weeks when 2 million-plus Kiwis swamp the Ministry of Health website to access their vaccine passport in time for Christmas.

With nearly every aspect of ‘‘normal’’ life soon to become dependent on showing a record of vaccination, it’s inexplicable that their development isn’t further along to avoid the lastminute scramble.

But leaving that aside, it’s clear the muchtouted ‘‘new normal’’ is here, even if somewhat belatedly compared with the rest of the world.

This is the future we should have been preparing ourselves for many months ago, when it was obvious the world had been changed for good by Covid.

But the fact that there are still so many Kiwis mourning the end of the elimination dream shows it wasn’t just the Government that had its head in the sand. Buying into the Covid-free New Zealand dream was nice while it lasted but it hasn’t done us any favours in terms of preparing for a radically different world.

But that was then, this is now. The last week has seen signs of real urgency from the Government to make up for lost time.

Last week, Jacinda Ardern laid out a roadmap for the future – one that relies heavily on high levels of vaccination, vaccine passports, and a level of restrictions and surveillance that would have seemed unthinkable a couple of years ago.

Judging by those crying foul from both sides of the debate – some think it is too reckless, others think it is too cautious – the Government probably got its response about right.

The reality of Covid is that no country around the world has so far come up with a perfect plan to outsmart the coronavirus and its dangerous variants.

The only strategy that seems to have any chance of success is vaccination, and after prevaricating on vaccine mandates for much of the last year Ardern and her ministers have gone all in. They’ve effectively swapped out elimination for a 90 per cent vaccination target as the road back to the freedoms we once had.

But it will be a very different sort of freedom to what we experienced before Delta. That was a world where too many people kidded themselves that they didn’t need to wear masks, or bother scanning in with the Covid tracer app.

Friday’s announcement should have been a reality check. The requirement for vaccine passports for nearly every aspect of everyday life is as close as you get to compulsory vaccination. But as with our border protections, the Government knows it is on the right side of public opinion.

There is zero tolerance among most of the population for vaccine holdouts, who are seen as holding the rest of the country to ransom. The pressure on them to be vaccinated will be immense.

And the pressure on the Government to get us over that magical line of 90 per cent will be even greater.

There is zero tolerance among most of the population to vaccine holdouts