What happened to immunity passports?

There are many now, perhaps the majority, who are now immune to the Wuhan plague and so they cannot pass it on nor contract it themselves. What relevance then are the lockdown restrictions to them?

The extraordinary rules of the lockdown were introduced for an emergency and were explicitly intended to be limited to that single purpose, and that purpose is to slow the spread of the disease so that it could become manageable. It was to be done by limiting person-to-person contact so that it cannot spread from an infected person to one who is vulnerable. Those who have had COVID-19 though are no longer a risk to others and no longer at risk from others. There is no reason at all to restrict their movement, at least nothing beyond the fatalistic superstition which has grown up around this whole thing.

When it came in, I for one expected the lockdown to be a temporary measure, until the warmer months when COVID-19 would not be such a menace. It would have been intolerable otherwise. Boris Johnson was explicit at the time that the health service could be overwhelmed in the cold months (and March was still cold), but now we have has the warmest May in many years, summer has begun, and we are still here. It is another week before shops start to open properly, and then only tentatively.

Foreign lands, usually ruled with a measure of suppressed tyranny, have left lockdown already, leaving us, unusually, the unfree nation.

It is more particularly galling for those for whom the restrictions have no relevance at all: those who have had it already. This was highlighted recently when Alok Sharma went down with suspected Wuhan Flu and the papers screamed that Boris Johnson would have to go into isolation under his own rules – but Boris has had it, and cannot get it yet again nor pass it on to others so there is logical no reason at all for isolation, and this time we all know it. As it happens, Mr Sharma does not have the disease.

Early on it was suggested that those who are immune, who are known to have had the disease or who have the antibodies for having had it, should be allowed to go free. I raised the point myself, and independently the idea of ‘immunity passports’ was floated. Yet nothing has happened.

Issuing immunity passports might cause resentment from those not entitled to one, but it would certainly produce hope, because it shows the lockdown passing and it shows there is a future after the disease.

Those who should be free but who are kept away from work because the regulations are to wide are being kept out of the economy without purpose. They should be released to get the country working.

When I wrote about this before, there were no reliable tests so the applicant would have to have had the disease and been diagnosed with it at the time. Now though there is a reliable test. Doctors and all those working in the medical and dental field should have the test and so relieve their own minds and get them working again, and follow up with anyone with a public-facing role. We may find that there are so many that we can stop worrying.

Perhaps it is no bother for the Health Secretary, since his brief is those who are sick not those who are well, but it is those who are well who can work, feed their families and pay the taxes that keep him in a job in the first place. He should look to the well, those who have been through it and out the other side, and give them their freedom immediately. The current position is cutting a hole in the economy for no purpose.