Can shops and pubs refuse to allow you to enter if you do not get the vaccine?

Vaccine: Martin Kenyon recalls receiving Covid jab

The Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was given to the first people in the world on Tuesday. GPs in England will begin giving the jab from next week, with originally 200 GP surgeries delivering the vaccine to those who are most vulnerable. But can places refuse to allow you to enter if you do not get the coronavirus vaccine?

A 90-year-old grandmother of four was the first person to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine outside of trials on Tuesday, December 8.

This represents the first day in the UK’s mass vaccination programme.

The UK has ordered 40 million doses of the vaccine, enough to vaccinate 20 million people.

However, so far only 800,000 doses of the vaccine have been delivered to the UK, enough to vaccine 400,000 people.

Two other vaccines, made by Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca, are in development and could soon be ready for widespread use.

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The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has published a list of nine high-priority groups accounting for around a quarter of the UK population.

The priority list is as follows:

• Residents in care homes for older adults and their carers, 80-year-olds and over and frontline health and social care workers
• 75-year-olds and over
• 70-year-olds and over and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals
• 65-year-olds and over
• 16 to 64-year-olds with serious underlying health conditions
• 60-year-olds and over
• 55-year-olds and over
• 50-year-olds and over.

Last week the new vaccine deployment minister Nadhim Zahawi suggested the use of immunity passports could become commonplace across Britain.

He said members of the public may need to provide some proof of their Covid vaccination status to dine out at a restaurant or attend a sporting event.

However this week, he said: “We are not looking at immunity passports at all.”

Mr Zahawi added: “The absolute focus is to make sure we vaccinate the nine categories the joint committee stipulated.

“Because actually the most important thing, ultimately, is to vaccinate the people who are at highest risk of death from this virus.

“The sooner we do it the sooner we can get back to normal life.”

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Professor Julian Savulescu, director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at Oxford University claims it is unethical not to offer immunity passports, adding vaccination passports could be seen as a means of mandatory vaccination.

He said: “Vaccination passports–after vaccines have been made available–can be seen as a mild form of “mandatory vaccination”.

“Proof of vaccination could be a requirement to, for example, access certain places (e.g. restaurants, hospitals, public transport, etc, depending on how restrictive we want the mandate to be) or engaging in certain social activities (e.g. mixing with people from different households) or enable health care or other care workers to not self-isolate if in contact with a person with Covid (there were 35 000 NHS workers in isolation at the peak of the pandemic because of contact). It is worth noting that this kind of measure has already been in place globally for a long time in a more selective way, e.g. in the US where, in most states, children cannot be enrolled in schools unless they are up to date with certain vaccinations.

“These are also a form of “vaccination passports”, which simply do not use that term. Yellow Fever Vaccination Certificates are required to travel to certain parts of the world where Yellow Fever is endemic.”

He added: “Thus, the strongest argument against vaccination passports is that there is something people can choose to do to lower their own risk: get vaccinated.

“This is what makes the strongest case against vaccination passports stronger than the strongest case against immunity passports (which could be obtained after immunity is mounted through natural infection): the choice to reduce their personal risk by vaccination is more reasonable and safer than the choice to get voluntarily infected in order to acquire immunity.

“The ethical ground for restriction of liberty is a person who represents a threat of harm to others.

“That is the grounds for lockdown, quarantine, isolation or mandating vaccination is to reduce the risk one person poses to another.

“However, if a person is no longer a threat to others, the justification for coercion evaporates. “If either natural immunity or a vaccine prevents virus transmission to others (and this remains to be determined), the grounds for restricting liberty disappear.

“This is one argument for an immunity or vaccination passport – it proves you are not a threat to others.”

Members of the public are divided over the decision not to introduce the immunity passports.

One person tweeted: “To get things back to normal? Once you introduce a vaccine passport, nothing is normal ever again. End of story.”

Another added: “In March, we took away all of your ability to live a normal life. but if you take this vaccine that we rushed through, you can have a passport to do what you used to, we’ll give you your rights back, which belonged to you anyway…”

One Twitter user wrote: “I will not be having the vaccine Syringe. But I will buy a black market health passport to get into my local. Long live fraudulent documents.”

Other people support the idea of a vaccine passport.

One person wrote: “It’s authoritarian but we should definitely do the vaccine passport thing. No way should anti-vax weirdos be putting normal people are risk. Of course, people with valid exemptions won’t need one but I imagine they will be few.”

Another added: “I would be happy to have something added to my passport that says I had any vaccine needed including Covid and I would feel safer if I knew the stranger sitting next to me on a plane, train or bus was not going to infect me. Personal view and not getting at you or others”.

One Twitter user wrote: “Why should people go back to sporting events if they know many people could be infected? If you ask for a health passport, we would all feel safer. Just like we feel safer because it is illegal for other drivers to drive without a license. Make them get a license and a vaccine”.

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