Vexed questions over mandatory vaccine passports

Mark Twain popularised the saying “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”, and it seems that Campbell Newman has joined Craig Kelly in using statistics to perpetuate the idea that Covid-19 is not as deadly as has been portrayed (“Vaccine passport opens the door to ugly segregation”, 14/9). Surely Amanda Hodge’s article (11/9) detailing her horror experience with Covid should have disabused him of this notion.

Neither he nor Kelly offers any solution to persuading the anti-vaccination recalcitrants to get vaccinated.

In recent days public health figures around the world have used Joe Biden’s phrase that Covid-19 is becoming the pandemic of the unvaccinated. Sure, no vaccine is 100 per cent effective, but both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines are extremely effective in preventing serious outcomes from Covid. Sure, people vaccinated against Covid can catch it and transmit it, but the people who will suffer most from this will be the unvaccinated.

It would be cynical of me to suggest, but I fear that there are political opportunists who can see Covid deniers representing a demographic worth pursuing in their quest to have their backsides warming parliamentary leather.

Tom Smith, Bowral, NSW

Thank you for the sensible article from Campbell Newman. In the US, 180 million Americans have been fully vaccinated and 42 million have tested positive for Covid.

Yet Joe Biden is mandating vaccines as a condition of employment. Reputable studies show that natural immunity from having had Covid is more durable than vaccination, and vaccinated people are more likely to spread Covid than those with natural immunity.

The most comprehensive and transparent vaccination data comes from Israel. In a major Israeli study published late last month from a sample of 700,000 people, natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccine-induced “immunity” in preventing symptomatic infections.

Can those promoting the idea of vaccine passports for entry to the workplace, restaurants, pubs, sporting and entertainment venues “please explain” the science and logic behind their advocacy?

Ramesh Thakur, O’Connor, ACT

I walked into a supermarket recently without a face mask on. Total forgetfulness. Not a form of protest, to be met with unbelievable hostility from an older woman and the following offensive remark: “Where’s your face mask, killer?” Her look was priceless. To her, I was the “Grim Reaper”, in human form. Fair dinkum.

Naked fear (of death) among the aged and ageing stalks our society as a consequence of Covid-19 and the government’s often confusing response to it. All social graces have gone out of the window.

We are, increasingly, a divided society where one demographic is pitted against another.

Michael J. Gamble, Belmont, Vic

In my view the vaccine passport has nothing to do with the curtailment of freedom or an attack on civil liberties. Nor is it segregation, heaven forbid.

It simply is a public heath imperative that we all comply. Whether it is going to church, a football match or a restaurant, there is no difference. So let us all pull together and follow the public health orders and if we do so, we will be out of all of this a lot sooner.

John Chapman, Thornleigh, NSW

Your Washington correspondent Adam Creighton has a very good handle on the average American’s understanding of liberty in “the land of the free” (“Biden’s vaccination mandate hardly unifies Americans”, 14/9). As I discovered on a short stay in the mid-west in 2018, they really believe in personal liberty – far more than we tame Australians have shown recently. Americans have a healthy suspicion of any expansion of government powers, and cherish those amendments tacked onto their Constitution.

It is not the need for vaccinations in order for a return to normal that irks many, but the issue of compulsion. It is also reasonable for it to be made a condition for employment in certain industries and for entry to certain premises, which is not comparable to racial or other forms of discrimination. Creighton does not disparage the benefits of vaccination or support anti-vaxxers, but highlights the relatively small number of Covid deaths in a world of almost eight billion. Meanwhile, we are meant to shiver at those case numbers served up daily by our lockdown-addicted premiers.

John Morrissey, Hawthorn, Vic