As writers from the Left, we are disturbed by this turn of events. We don’t think there is anything progressive about the current move towards compelled — and in places mandatory — Covid vaccinations. These are discriminatory against minority communities, many of whom for historical reasons are suspicious of medicine and the state, and have had lower vaccine take-up rates. They are enormously costly, not only in economic terms, creating huge profits for the pharmaceutical companies rolling them out, with BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer making between them over US$1,000 per second, but also in human resources terms — with thousands of health workers being pulled out of (already understaffed, in many cases) hospitals to run mass vaccination centres.

As a result, the current requirement for two or more annual vaccines to provide protection is likely to result in much-needed human resources being permanently removed from healthcare systems that have already faced a disproportionate harm from the Covid restriction measures. Moreover, given the deficit hysteria that still dominates the mainstream political discourse, despite everything that the pandemic has taught us about the true mechanics of government spending, it is also likely to result in financial resources being diverted away from other sectors.

The mandates are also clearly leading to vaccine hoarding in rich countries, where doses are being forced on younger people, who are little at risk from Covid, while elderly and vulnerable people in poorer countries have been deprived access to them. The pressure from multinational donors for African countries to reach a 60% vaccination target, meanwhile, has led to disturbing recent reports of forced vaccination in Rwanda, where vaccinees have been handcuffed and beaten to comply. Finally, and equally disturbingly, the compulsion element has led to a huge rise in distrust of the medical establishment, which will have serious future consequences for medical care.

So why have governments pushed towards compulsion, and why have so many supposedly progressive politicians — Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau to name but three — been among the most vocal supporters of this move? In our view, much of this relates to the perception of the “collective good” that we analysed in relation to lockdowns in our last article for UnHerd. The argument that vaccination is required to protect others is a persuasive one. And yet, one of the ironies of the mainstream Left’s response to Covid is that, as the pandemic has evolved, this definition of the “collective good” and perceptions of risk has been revealed to be entirely ethno- and Western-centric.

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Vaccines are a very good example of this. The Left’s approach to personal risk reveals a framing which owes a lot to neoliberal constructs of the individual and society. “Staying safe” involved minimising individual risk, which was never broadly comparable across age, class, gender — or geography.

In a brilliant essay at the outset of the pandemic, the Mozambican sociologist Elísio Macamo analysed risk in African and European societies, and noted how levels and perceptions and approaches were entirely different because of the different levels of socio-economic comfort. Indeed, it is now clear that with its much younger population and greater resilience through exposure to a range of viruses that boost immunity, the risk of Covid to people in Africa is much lower than the risk to older and vulnerable people in richer countries. This means, effectively, that the shared risk from Covid is now being outsourced to Africa through the push for universal vaccination: poor African countries are required to get into debt to procure vaccines, and vaccinate large numbers of people, in order to protect older and wealthier people in rich countries.

In fact, a real sharing of risk and collective approach would acknowledge that it is unacceptable — and certainly unprogressive — to force poor countries to immiserate themselves further with World Bank loans to vaccinate unwilling populations who are already suspicious of medical colonialism, in order to protect richer people with much longer life expectancies. The Western liberal’s comforting canard, that “No one’s safe until everyone’s safe”, is shown really to mean that “Until I feel safe, I will continue to destroy the livelihoods and health outcomes of poor countries”. This is indeed clear, with concerns aired that poor countries will be “variant factories”, revealing that this — and not concern for the health of poor Africans — is one of the real drivers of the global vaccine push.

Once the inequities and medical colonialism implicit in the global drive is recognised, the progressive rhetoric around universal vaccination is revealed as a house of cards. This applies to the West as well. Much of the institutional framing has revolved around people’s “duty” to get vaccinated. People of all ages were told to get the jab — and now their children — to avoiding infecting others, to help reach herd immunity and “eradicate Covid”, and to stop taking up hospital beds. However, none of these arguments holds up to scrutiny.

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It is now patently obvious that high levels of vaccination don’t correlate with fewer cases. Indeed, the most vaccinated region in the world, Europe, is also the one experiencing the greatest surge in new cases. While Israel, the first country in the world to administer a fourth dose of the vaccine, at the time of writing also has the highest number of daily new Covid cases per capita.

This simply confirms what countless studies had already demonstrated: that while the Covid vaccines are excellent for the elderly and vulnerable populations in reducing the risk of serious illness, they offer a very limited protection from the possibility of getting infected and infecting others. It also means that the main rationale for vaccine passports — that of creating “Covid-free spaces” and reducing the spread of the virus — is completely unfounded, which is why several countries are now considering scrapping them.

The fact that even the vaccinated can catch and transmit the virus is also the reason why it is simply false to claim that by getting jabbed you are contributing to “eradicating Covid”. As is now being admitted by a growing number of scientists around the world, with the current vaccines we are unlikely to reach herd immunity any time soon. None of this should be surprising, since the idea that herd immunity can only be achieved through vaccination is itself a new one, which appears to have been developed by the WHO in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Princeton University historian of medicine David J. Robertson notes that while mass vaccination has certainly been associated with herd immunity in recent decades, it has never previously been seen as the sole means of achieving this immunity.

As for the notion that people should get vaccinated to avoid taking up hospital beds, it’s an argument that makes little sense, for obvious reasons, if aimed at those who faced little or no risk of ending up in the hospital in the first place. Respected epidemiologists have noted that the chances of an 18-year-old dying of Covid are 1 in 10,000 of those of a 75 year-old. Even for people under 50, the risk is low. While a small number of people in this category might indeed end up in hospital as a result of their choice not to get vaccinated, it’s unclear why they should be held any more responsible than someone who ends up in hospital as a result of, say, unhealthy lifestyle choices.

Moreover, the rhetoric around universal vaccination is leading to negative impacts in poorer countries, where health funding and resources have many competing and more deserving priorities: as the Ghanaian historian of medicine Samuel Adu-Gyamfi wrote in December: “It should be up to African countries to determine their own public health goals, and Covid-19 is far from being the most serious public health concern in Africa today.”

It’s hard to see the collective benefit of vaccinating everyone against a virus that targets only a minority of the population – especially if this achieved through highly discriminatory and segregational policies.

Even from an individual perspective, for younger people who risk little or nothing from Covid, it’s unclear whether there is even an individual benefit from receiving the vaccine. It rather feels like, in the rush to vaccinate every living thing, the elderly have once again been sacrificed. A focused protection approach might have geared all efforts towards reaching the highest possible vaccination coverage in people aged 60+ as quickly as possible — including, as a last resort, age-specific mandates (unnecessary in practice because people in this age group, in general, are more than happy to get vaccinated).

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Ultimately, it would appear that the prevailing mass vaccination strategy of most countries has benefited neither the less vulnerable nor the most vulnerable.

Fortunately, the narrative does appear to be shifting. Even the WHO is now claiming that, precisely because the current vaccines have a negligible impact on prevention of infection and transmission, “a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable”. The same concern was voiced by the vaccine strategy chief of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Marco Cavaleri, who added that administering repeated booster doses could potentially lead to “problems with immune response” — that is, lower the overall protection of societies. “While use of additional boosters can be part of contingency plans, repeated vaccinations within short intervals would not represent a sustainable long-term strategy,” Cavaleri said. He also said boosters “can be done once, or maybe twice, but it’s not something that we can think should be repeated constantly”.

Meanwhile, in the United States, president Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers is now being pushed back in the courts. Earlier this month, Alaska and other states prevailed in the US Supreme Court in their efforts to prevent the federal government from implementing a vaccine mandate on private businesses. And now a federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt to the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate, in yet another setback to the federal government’s actions.

It may be that the push to universal vaccination will now subside. But there are many pieces of public healthcare that must now be put back together. Trust in the public health profession has weakened, with grave potential future health outcomes. The hold of what Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism” has advanced. The medical systems of poor countries have been appropriated, leaving huge scars in their coverage of existing endemic diseases. Physical segregation — much of it racialised — has been institutionalised in many Western countries.

None of this was ever progressive; a true progressive healthcare system in the future must be based on the WHO’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Most important of all though, it must be driven by what communities need and want, and not what globalised technocrats determine is good for them.

What would happen, though, if instead of creating the impression of headlessness, we actually took artists out of the creative process? Well, now we can find out. Researchers are experimenting with applying machine learning to visual imagery, and the result is the unnerving phenomenon of ‘GAN art’.

A ‘GAN’ is a ‘generative adversarial network’, which is to say two machine learning networks programmed to run in parallel. The first is fed a set of input data, such as a type of image, and told to generate new, believable versions of that data. The second is tasked with assessing whether the new, AI-generated data are real or fake.

The aim is for the first network to succeed in fooling the second network more than half the time. As the two models adjust in relation to one another, they become increasingly skilled at predicting and manipulating patterns in the input imagery.

One playful result of this is web or smartphone apps that invite the user to ‘create’ — that is, prompt the AI to create — images based on text. Wombo is a popular one: you can choose from several different ‘styles’, enter your text prompt and watch the machine create an image.

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When you do so, two things become apparent. First, the more abstract the prompt, the more difficult it is to distinguish the output from human-created art. But secondly, there’s something indefinably off about them. That comes more clearly into focus when you give the machine a more specific prompt — as I discovered when I asked Wombo to draw me a cat.

Cat images are so popular and widespread online that one 2013 cat food ad claimed that they make up 15% of all internet traffic. With such an immense dataset, you’d think an AI would find it easy to generate a cat image.

But when I prompted Wombo with ‘Kitten’ I got what looks like the disfigured victim of some deranged scientist’s experimental flesh-sculpting, as viewed through a haze of LSD. Here it is; judge for yourself.

Looking at this abomination, the off-ness becomes easier to grasp.

Everyone — at least, everyone human who’s ever spent time online — knows what a kitten looks like. A skilled artist can convey a kitten’s shape and movement with a few lines of a pencil. But that knowledge is acquired not just by mechanically digesting and attempting to synthesise the aggregate of two-dimensional kitten images, but also understanding what kittens are, and what they mean in our cultural context.

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Without that capacity to filter and actively re-interpret in terms of the wider context, replacing meaning with pattern recognition creates something that’s both eerily almost-intelligible but also deeply disturbing. It is, as Macbeth says, “a tale told by an idiot”.

So what, you might say. GAN ‘art’ isn’t art. It’s a game, to amuse us for a few moments online when we should be doing something else. But absurd as it is, the idea of AI ‘art’ only takes a pervasive contemporary dream to a slightly more absurd conclusion: that of eliminating individuals from human culture.

The positive version of this dream imagines that we could promote equality by minimising the role of specific, individual contributions to human society. You see versions of this in the widespread academic effort, for some decades now, to downplay the study of ‘great’ individuals in favour of mass movements or widespread sociocultural phenomena.

Well-established in disciplines such as history or literature, this has percolated even as far as the quintessential study of great individuals, the ‘Grand Strategy’ course at Yale. Here, the course director Professor Beverley Gage prompted debate last year when she shifted the course curriculum away from individual political actors toward grassroots activism and civil rights.

We see same the effort to de-emphasise leadership in favour of the collective in the rise of technocratic forms of government. This is often well-meant: this study shows populations support technocracy in proportion to how incompetent their elected government is perceived to be. In other words, the more disillusioned we grow with the ability of our elected leaders to govern, the more longingly we look to ‘neutral’, depoliticised ways of running our affairs.

And confidence in human leadership is waning across the board. Angry populists condemn the ruling class as out of touch; critics decry the current government as incompetent; others dismiss the electorate as ignorant or racist. The problem, across the board, is: us.

Faced with our manifestly disappointing powers of human self-governance, the dream of eliminating leadership can’t but seem appealing. And it’s in this light that we should view Tuesday’s vote by our MPs, to entrench vaccine passes in British domestic life.

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This has been presented as a measure to control Covid — or, as George Osborne put it, a matter of “citizenship”. But it’s worth bearing in mind that emergency powers have a way of sticking around. Anti-terror measures enacted in America in the wake of 9/11 massively expanded US surveillance and are still in force. Once the infrastructure and social norms are in place for digital ID, they are unlikely to go away again — especially given the Government has already signalled a desire to introduce such a scheme.

From some perspectives, digital ID is an obvious and sensible move. In a 2020 video, the aerospace and weapons manufacturer Thales offers an enticing picture of how much easier many ordinary interactions could become with a ‘Digital ID Wallet’. Controlled from a smartphone by each individual user, Thales imagines this centralising a user’s personal data, eliminating the messy business of individual assessment and human error from ID checks and record-keeping across all areas of life.

The power of such tools is evident, as is their appeal from a governance perspective. But once they’re in place, the scope is infinite to extend them beyond simply logging driving licence records.

Once identities are held digitally, our behaviour can be tracked — and ‘nudged’ — digitally as well. And our elites, habituated by university courses that highlight the importance of large-scale social and cultural patterns over the specifics of individual experience, already look eagerly toward the potential offered by AI pattern recognition. But machine learning systems are only as good as their inputs. And pattern recognition isn’t the same thing as interpretation.

In an AI ‘art’ generator, this has little impact beyond creating creepy kitten-images. But in contexts that affect people’s lives more directly, machine learning has more serious implications. Imagine, for example, that we embraced a ‘prevention’ oriented public health system, using citizen data collected around a Digital ID Wallet. This isn’t so far-fetched: a data-driven pilot scheme aimed at tackling obesity via measures including tracking scheme members’ shopping history was launched earlier this year.

And while the existing pilot scheme focuses on rewards, a unified ID would make it easy to implement sanctions too. The Health Pass now required for entry into bars, clubs or venues to combat the spread of Covid-19 could without great difficulty be extended to other behaviours or linked with purchase history. What this change means is the arrival, likely for good, of a mode of digital-era governance where for the first-time participation in public life can be made conditional on ‘healthy’ behaviours.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The mutant kitten is a vivid illustration of what happens when you task a computer with doing something human, without the capacity to understand what humans actually care about. Applied to real lives, the blind brilliant-idiot quality of AI pattern recognition is already causing miscarriages of justice.

Now imagine extending that deep into your life: having your Health Pass suspended because you’ve bought too many units of alcohol this week, perhaps, meaning you can’t access essential services. Never mind that you were shopping for an event at your local social club. The computer sees a pattern. And unlike for a human, for machine intelligence there’s no difference between pattern recognition and meaning.

The slow collapse of social meaning into computer-legible pattern is reshaping us into a post-political, post-individual human order — one resisted most vigorously, to date, by conservatives. It was chiefly conservative politicians and voters who framed Brexit as pushback against technocracy. At Yale, conservative donors including Henry Kissinger forced Professor Gage to resign earlier this year. And on Tuesday 98 Tories — nearly a third of elected Conservative MPs — rebelled on Covid passes. Boris owes his victory to Labour Party support, and is probably a dead man walking within his own party now.

But Boris’s loss of face in his own party is one fraction of a far more deadly bleeding of authority: our downward spiral of disintegrating trust in human government full stop. As long as this continues, the temptation will persist to solve the crisis of authority with ever deeper rule by AI: the only compromise option left when we can’t agree on which human or humans should be in charge.

Fittingly, while writing this, I stumbled on another, current digital art project titled Headless. This one doesn’t depict the impersonal nature of finance — it’s trying to harness decentralised digital technology to human ends, by embracing it as an engine of creativity.

I hope its creators are right to think this can be done. For we’ve just taken another step closer to a world ruled by machines; machines that are brilliant at detecting patterns, but idiots when it comes to understanding what those patterns mean. And unless we’re able to humanise those technologies, this dawning age of digitised governance will digest the patterns of our social order and regurgitate a world of idiotic, inhuman cruelty.

A big new wave like this, if it passes through the population, will always hit a small minority of vulnerable people badly who will then need hospital care — and as we are constantly being reminded, a small percentage of a big number can still be a big number. To make matters worse, this wave looks like it might peak in the beginning of January which is the busiest week of the year in UK hospitals, and an annual pinch point at which (because of bad resourcing and planning) we have almost no spare NHS capacity. So they are worried, as ever, about terrifying footage of overflowing hospitals.

What would be the correct response to this concern?

The first thing to make clear is that if the underlying premise is correct — that Omicron spreads like wildfire and will lead to significantly more reinfections and breakthrough cases — it is going to be very hard to stop it. You’d have to go for a full-on nationwide lockdown to seriously attempt to slow it down — and even that may only delay the peak by a couple of weeks.

But there is no appetite for another full-on lockdown, especially as it would ruin Christmas again, and the Government is already unpopular. They simply don’t have the political strength to do it — and there are doubtless many people who wouldn’t obey it. Meanwhile, a small selection of minor rule-changes such as “Plan B” entails will not make much meaningful difference. Advising working from home but still going to parties, increasing the wearing of masks in shops but not in pubs and increasing use of vaccine passports for a variant that spreads easily among the vaccinated is not a serious policy response to Omicron. Might it push the peak of the wave out by a day or two? Who knows, but if we are going to be at a million cases before Christmas, it’s a meaningless difference.

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So why do such a pointless thing? The answer, as always, is politics.

The first calculation is within parliament: No 10 figures they can afford to upset their own backbenchers and that Boris Johnson’s position is not genuinely vulnerable (despite media stories). In any case, Keir Starmer will blindly support any restrictions, so they will win any vote.

Within the wider electorate, they calculate that the voters who will be most upset by such a move are in the minority, and will either vote for them anyway or not vote at all. At this level, the restrictions are a minor inconvenience for most and will still command majority support.

Most important, they imagine a bad scenario in early January with hospitals really under pressure, and they don’t want to be vulnerable to the charge that they “did nothing”. It’s all too reminiscent of the charge of “too little too late” that caused them such grief last winter. This way, they can at least say that they took action.

But will they get away with it? This time, I don’t think so.

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First, it will cause genuine harm to businesses, costing the economy billions and leaving a long tail of uncertainty and unease.

Second, the level of disobedience regarding the  new regulations will increase, and further diminish the authority of the Government. The timing of the announcement will be deemed suspicious by a cynical public, coming so hard on the heels of the Christmas party scandal, and distrust will increase. The absurd inclusion of vaccine passports as a measure to combat a variant whose main threat is vaccine escape will result in the anti-vax and anti-lockdown minority growing, hardening and entrenching. They will be increasingly estranged from mainstream society.

Most gravely of all, it sets a precedent that will now take years to roll back. Last winter’s lockdown was justified in order to get us to the first vaccines; vaccines have now been offered to everyone. With this second winter intervention, the principle is being established that lockdowns or lockdowns-light — centralised diktats about the movements of every citizen — are the proper response to new variants or potential pressures on the health service. And we all know there will be new variants that escape vaccines better than Omicron in the future; and new viruses after that.

We had a chance, this winter, to show Europe and the world that the UK could achieve a better outcome by avoiding pointless and divisive vaccine passports and further lockdown-style measures. That chance was squandered yesterday, and this cynical, superficial Government will eventually pay the price.

Omicron has been detected — and may have first arisen — in Gauteng province, South Africa. There have only been a few hundred cases detected, so it’s hard to say much about it with any real certainty. But it appears to be more transmissible and there are concerns that immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection, will be less effective against it. There have been, as I write, three cases detected in the UK, and there are real (and justified) fears that we are heading once again into a lockdown Christmas. 

But nonetheless, we have been very lucky.

We mustn’t forget that the virus is constantly mutating. Every time it copies itself, there is a chance that it will make some minor error. Most of those mutations either have no effect or make it less effective at spreading. But every so often one will improve it: perhaps make it harder for the immune system to see, or make the virus quicker at copying itself.

The other new variants, notably Alpha and Delta, had several mutations, but Omicron has dozens: around 50. And 10 of them are on the bits of the “spike” protein on the virus’s surface which bind with our cells — the “receptor binding domains”. Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and former member of SAGE, tells me that these are exactly the kind of mutations which virologists have been expecting and dreading: “It’s biologically plausible that they will drive higher transmission. They’ve been identified before as ones we should be really careful about.”

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So far, it doesn’t sound very lucky. But in one mutation, Omicron has been kind to us. Like Alpha before it, it has a particular mutation, 69-70del, two missing RNA letters in its genome — part of the “S gene” which codes for the spike protein. By happy chance, those missing letters are at one of three places that many PCR tests look at.

What it means is that if a PCR test comes back positive on two out of its three areas — if it has an “S-gene dropout” — then you can be pretty sure you’ve got one of the variants. It means that Alpha last year and now Omicron can be tracked pretty effectively, just with PCR testing: even without sequencing the genomes, you can see where these S-gene dropout results are happening and it’ll give you a good idea of how the variant is spreading.

“It’s a complete gift that the S-gene dropout hits this variant,” says Ewan Birney, the deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. If it didn’t, we would have much less of an idea where Omicron is. (We’ve actually been lucky twice. If Delta hadn’t replaced Alpha, then the S-gene dropout wouldn’t have told us anything, because both the circulating variants would have had it.)

So far, so good. But is the new variant more transmissible and/or more able to bypass our immunity, whether from vaccines or infection? And is it more or less dangerous to people who catch it?

These are hard questions to answer, because at the moment, we only have data from South Africa, and South Africa’s population is tricky to compare with ours. It’s younger, for a start — the median South African is 26-years old, while the median Brit is 40. It’s also much less vaccinated: somewhere around 75% of Britons have been double-jabbed, while barely a quarter have in South Africa (which is, to my surprise, more to do with uptake than supply). It has also had far fewer confirmed cases per capita.

That said, we can make some guesses. When a new variant emerges, it’s difficult to tell whether it has spread because it is better at spreading, or because it happens to have arisen in a convenient place. Imagine a virus which happened to mutate into a new variant in someone who was about to go to a major conference. It might infect hundreds of people and show up all over the country, but it wouldn’t be because it was any more transmissible — it was just that it got lucky.

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With Omicron, this seems unlikely to be the case. Thanks to the S-gene dropout, we can see that it’s spreading faster than you’d expect. Farrar says that “there has been a clear upswing of transmission in Gauteng, which seems to be driven by the variant”. “It probably can outcompete Delta,” says Babak Javid, an immunology lab director at the University of California San Francisco, “although by how much is still up in the air.” 

Is that because it’s better at spreading in general, or because it can evade immunity? So far, we don’t have the data to say for sure. Soon, we’ll start to get results from laboratory studies, and later from epidemiological observations, but Rupert Beale, leader of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks it’s “a few weeks before we get useful information, and the other side of Christmas before we know anything definitive”.

But on the plus side, antibodies aren’t the only part of our immune system. We also have T-cells, which are less easily fooled by mutations. To oversimplify, antibodies stop you getting infected in the first place, but T-cells stop you from getting very ill. So Javid and Birney think it is plausible that Omicron will spread quite easily among vaccinated and/or previously infected people, but will be less likely to kill them or make them severely ill.

There has also been speculation that Omicron is inherently less deadly to people with no pre-existing immunity. That’s not impossible, but everyone I spoke to said that any definitive conclusions are premature. “The speculation is extremely uninformed,” says Beale. “We just don’t know until it gets into a more vulnerable population, which sadly it seems it’s likely to. We can hope it’s less pathogenic, but it’s foolish to make that assumption.”

So it might be better at spreading, and able to escape our immunity to at least some degree; and while it’s theoretically possible it might be less deadly, that’s certainly not a proposition we want to put any weight on. The question is: what should we do, and are we facing a second bleak Covid winter?

The pandemic should have taught us that acting early is usually better than acting late, and that preparing for worst-case scenarios is important. It’s like chess, says Beale: “You play your moves in the most flexible order.” If we assume it’ll all be OK, we might be right, but if we’re wrong, we’ll end up with Omicron spreading all over the place. Whereas if we assume it’ll be pretty bad, we can always open up again later on.

I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them very sensible, suggesting that there’s no point closing borders to South Africa because variants will get through anyway, and that it’s just punishing countries for doing good surveillance. But I think they are wrong. 

Yes, the variant will get through, if it hasn’t already. Farrar points out that it was first identified on 11 November, and its sequence suggests that it had already been circulating for some time before then. “I think it may already be on every continent,” he says. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no point in trying to reduce its spread. “Border closures might buy you a little time.” Birney agrees: “Shutting the borders until we understand it, minimising the seeding events, is a good rational move.”

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It’s true that there’s a risk of punishing countries for responsible surveillance, but I don’t see what the alternative is — pretending that they don’t have lots of Omicron circulating? Perhaps the thing to do is also put restrictions on countries with poor surveillance.

Because “buying a little time” might be important. If nothing else, it gives us time to understand it: if Omicron is highly virulent and vaccine-resistant, then our best response will be rather different to what it would be if it isn’t. It also gives us a chance to get more boosters in arms and to stockpile antiviral drugs. 

All the same arguments apply to other non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as introducing vaccine passports or asking people to work from home if possible. But there are other things Britain can do, too. 

One thing is to hugely increase our vaccine manufacturing capacity — something which would be good for us and for the world. Rolling out children’s vaccines and booster jabs faster wouldn’t hurt. One scientist I spoke to suggested making antiviral meds available by post when people get a positive result: “They need to be given quickly to have a good effect, so you can’t rely on GP appointments. You need to link them to Track & Trace”. Cheaper, quicker PCR testing at airports would help.”

But while those measures are important, they’re not addressing the root of the issue. For Farrar, the emergence of Omicron is just another reminder that we need to vaccinate the world, not just the rich world. “There’s been political drift for months now, in terms of access to vaccines,” he said. “The rich world thought it was over, so they’ve been kicking it into the long grass.” Variants like Omicron will continue to arise until the world has a decent level of immunity.

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We’ve been lucky, with Omicron. But it may well still end up becoming the dominant strain, just as Delta did before it. If it doesn’t, then another one will come along. And it will be “incredibly disruptive”, says Farrar: “Everyone’s putting restrictions in.” Certainly, to avoid another lockdown Christmas, we need to act now.

But if we want to be sure we don’t have another one next year, we need to get this pandemic behind us — and that means billions more doses of vaccine, distributed around the world. We won’t always be so lucky.

The French love of protesting at the drop of the hat is perhaps their defining character trait, but it reflects a deeper culture of political violence that goes deep into their history, and not just the revolution.

Theirs is a culture in which use of force is much more acceptable, and where authority has both menace and glamour. Last time I made the crossing back from France to England, the first UK Border Force man I saw was sat in one of those knackered old swing office chairs, with the word “Colin” written on A4 on the back; the whole veneer served to ensure that authority in England was something to not take too seriously.

It was a different matter two weeks earlier, crossing from Italy into France, where one is greeted along that slightly sensitive border by a parade of young French soldiers carrying machine guns and dressed in dazzling outfits, like a Jean Paul Gaultier advert. It’s designed to show that they mean business, and that authority should be admired and feared.

While our police spent much of their summer either on their knees in front of Black Lives Matters protesters, or running away from them, the gendarmes have a somewhat different attitude to demonstrations: since the gilet jaunes protest began at least 24 people have lost an eye as a result, while five have lost a hand; 315 have suffered head injuries, and two have died.

France’s frequent eruption of violence is baffling to its neighbours. They have short working hours, generous welfare and a first-class health care system (far better than Britain’s). The French live very long lives on a comfortable pension, and their disposable income is rising.. The French inhabit a country that to many of its neighbours feels like paradise, and so the Dutch expression“leven als God in Frankrijk” (live like God in France), but then historically that partly explains the readier resort to violence — you had to have a certain belligerence to occupy Europe’s most desirable real estate.

Next time you’re lucky enough to visit the country, take a glance outside when you’re driving through the Loire Valley and look at what you see – chateaux, lots of them. There are over 1,000 in that region alone, because chateaux tended to be built to replace older castles and strongholds, and western France was littered with them.

The geography of Britain ensured that a monarch based by the Thames was able to grow wealthy enough to rule over the entirety of England. The kingdom of Wessex united all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 927 and there was never any danger of the north being powerful enough to secede. Wales was slowly conquered and while Scotland was a different matter, it was never an existential threat to England.

The sheer size of France – four times that of England – made it much harder for Paris to establish dominance over the country’s natural boundaries, which are shaped by the Pyrenees and the Alps on two sides of the hexagon, the sea by two others, and by a vulnerable and ambiguous region to its east and north. The kings of the Franks ruled with the help of 12 regional lords, and until the revolution “France” was effectively the region around Paris.

The variance of France made it a country hard to unite, with huge divides in language and culture, likened by one essayist to “a horse whose four legs move in a different time”. Graham Robb in his brilliant The Discovery of France identified 55 different languages and dialects, and noted that in 1789 just 11% of the population spoke the national language. In Gascony and Provence people from the north were still called Franchiman or a Franciot (“French”).

France’s militarism is a legacy of Paris’s inability to create a monopoly of violence in a land which has been intensely fought over down the centuries. Medieval castles were a form of arms race between highly-independent duchies and counties, and the same was true of cavalry warfare, which largely developed in western France. The Normans, in particular, bred ever stronger and more aggressive horses, spending huge amounts of effort on mastering this form of warfare. The Battle of Hastings was won with a faked retreat, a tactic that requires a great deal of training and coordination; the Anglo-Saxons, in contrast, did not fight on horseback, which is why you probably knows lots of Williams and Roberts but not many Leofwines or Wulfnoths.

Cavalry was the foundation of medieval Europe, which is why French became for centuries the language of the ruling classes from Scotland to Jerusalem. It is why pretty much every single English word to do with war – apart, perhaps, from “war” itself – comes from French rather than Germanic roots.

It’s strange that those raised in the English-speaking world are taught a cliché of French army tanks that go backwards and joke about  “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, when, historically, France is by far the most war-like country in Europe.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

In his Decisive Battles of the World, Victorian historian Edward Creasy wrote: “If we were to endeavour…. to ascertain which European nation has contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. It is impossible to deny her paramount importance in history.” At the start of the First World War, the country had four times as many soldiers in uniform as Britain, and almost as many as Prussian-controlled Germany, which had 50% more people.

Even in the build-up to the Second World War, France was more aggressive than Britain towards Hitler, and many divisions fought bitterly against the Germans in 1940, with even the Dunkirk evacuation carried out with French support and the loss of 18,000 Frenchmen. But the country was fatally divided politically, psychologically scarred by the huge losses of the First World War, when 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, and facing an almost psychotically determined enemy.

In living memory, France has been engaged in two hugely costly wars, losing 20,000 men in Vietnam and another 25,000 in Algeria. These casualties dwarf the numbers of British troops lost either in the Northern Ireland Troubles (763) or colonial insurrections like Malaya or Cyprus, which had fewer British casualties still. Relative to their population, they were also much more devastating than Vietnam was to America.

The violence in Algeria spilled over into metropolitan France, which is one reason why President de Gaulle is believed to hold the record for number of assassination attempts, somewhere in the region of 25 or 26, and his survival is all the more impressive considering his giant stature. Britain’s own Queen Victoria survived eight, although some of these were quite feeble (someone firing tobacco out of a gun, for instance). When the OAS try to kill you, they really try.

While the last massacre of English civilians took place in 1819, Parisian authorities killed at least 40 and maybe as many as 200 people in 1961, there protesting the war in Algeria. Because of the way that the American narrative has completely captured the British imagination, this story is much less well known than relatively peaceful campaign for civil rights in the US. A similar event in California or New York would be the subject of countless films, songs and plays.

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By Ed West

During the Sixties, France even seemed close to a coup, and still today its military contains various elements who seem quite keen on overthrowing the government, something inconceivable in Britain. A coup would actually be quite popular with the French public, according to polls, although it’s hard to know if this is just performative Frenchness at work. But, then, this is a country which still holds military parades, and still takes military honour and valour seriously.

Everything in French history is much more violent than ours. There was nothing like the Albigensian crusade in England, a regional conflict that killed maybe a million people, although the Harrying of the North came close (done, of course, by you-know-who). The Jacquerie, France’s equivalent of the Peasant’s Revolt, was far more violent than the English uprising, both in total deaths and the sadism and cruelty involved. During the Reformation Mary Tudor was regarded as a monster for killing 300 Protestants, while her sister Elizabeth put to death 200 Catholics priests and their sympathisers. The French Wars of Religion killed an estimated 3 million. As well as the Terror, the French Revolution also led to what was arguably the first modern genocide, in the Vendée.

Religious violence has now made an unwelcome return, and in recent years it has been quite normal to see French soldiers patrolling the streets, often protecting cathedrals that previously suffered destruction at the hands of the revolutionaries. Britain and France share a similar sized Islamic terrorism problem, but the scale of the violence there is much more spectacular and terrifying, largely because there are so many more firearms available – 12.7 million vs 3 million – plus the ease of transporting guns over the border. Britain has such a disarmed population that it is something of a running joke online, with London police divisions tweeting out their latest confiscations of Swiss army knives and particularly vicious-looking spoons. It makes us safer, but there’s also something quite demoralising about it.

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By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

While there is something about the French readiness to protest and riot that is shocking to the Anglo-Saxon soul, it also quite admirable. Deep down, there is a great deal of respect for this belligerence, part of that wider Gallic battle with Americanisation, the modern world, and often reality.

We, though, are too timid and passionless to spend every Saturday blocking the centre of town, or driving a lorry load of slurry into the nearest government building; and if we protested like the French, we couldn’t do so with the same panache. Even the gilet jaunes movement managed a certain stylistic triumph while wearing high-viz vests, which in Britain are the very symbol of health and safety-driven inertia and defeatism. For us, the constant protests would get tiresome, the strikes would be a pain in the backside. And we’d look as cool as someone called Colin holding a clipboard.

Having met Blair and his team several times to discuss how to address jihadist terrorism, I understood their temptation to veer towards safety and security over life and liberty. But the truth remains that those who trade liberty for security invariably end up with neither. Sadly, many of the debates we had then about how to balance our safety with our freedoms are resurfacing now in the name of beating Covid. But it is not as if we haven’t been down this route before.

During my years spent largely unsuccessfully lobbying successive governments on extremism policy, I met Blair, Brown and Cameron. My work was mainly informed by my own survival of the War on Terror-era encroachments against liberty. I believed I was granted such audiences precisely because I had survived the human rights abuses of that decade only to emerge as a critic of my own former Islamist dogma, while advocating the universality of human rights.

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We will have to take a side in Cold War II

By Maajid Nawaz

In 2002, during my time as a Prisoner of Conscience in Egypt, I witnessed British and other detainees tortured in the name of the War on Terror. I do not know of any UK involvement in my own treatment, but my experience did inform my desire to work for an end to British complicity in such abuse anywhere in the world. Blair’s Labour government was in fact implicated in the “extraordinary rendition” of suspects to third countries, where they were tortured for intelligence. When this practice was eventually investigated, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee went so far as to say that “British agencies continued to supply intelligence to allies despite knowing or suspecting abuse in more than 200 cases”.

It was also Blair’s government that criminalised the right to silence at British ports. Thanks to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to this day any person may be detained and questioned, with no need for reasonable grounds. It remains a criminal offence not to answer questions during such an interrogation. These laws were originally intended for Irish Republicans, and came to be used largely for jihadist terrorism — but typical of government mission creep, they were eventually applied to obstruct controversial journalism. The most publicised example of this occurred in 2013, when Glen Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained under these powers at Heathrow airport for nine hours.

It took New Labour’s successors, a Conservative-led government, to soften these Schedule 7 powers by including a reduction in the maximum period of detainment from nine hours to six, extending the rights to consult privately with a solicitor and to have a person informed of the detention, as well as the repeal of power to take a DNA sample. Staying silent, however, remains a criminal offence.

In 2006, upon my return from Egyptian prison, I too was detained and interrogated at Heathrow airport under Schedule 7. My DNA was taken from me by law. This is why, during my work around challenging Islamist extremism, I sought to use the limited platform that I had gained to challenge these powers and advised their repeal.

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Sadly, civil liberties were not a priority for Blair. He tried and failed to introduce national identity cards, even insisting that the scheme should go ahead as a question of “modernity”. Blair also tried to extend the detention of terror suspects without charge for 90 days, the amount of time it took the Egyptian regime to charge me, after placing us in solitary confinement once they removed us from their torture dungeons. After being defeated by Labour backbenchers and the Tory opposition, Labour still managed to secure 28-day detention for suspects, which remains the longest period of pre-charge detention of any common law country.

I have always maintained that the answer to extremist speech is counter-speech, not proscription. In fact, PM Gordon Brown cited my views as a reason, when challenged by the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, why certain extremist but non-terrorist groups had not been banned. Blair, more recently, co-signed a letter along with David Cameron and religious leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths asking for the taking down of extremist speech online, the argument being that it creates a “climate conducive to terrorism, hate crime and violence”. I fear the lines here are in danger of becoming increasingly blurred.

But Tony Blair’s biggest error committed in the name of “keeping us all safe” is one that requires no further elaboration. His decision to invade Iraq under the guise of “national security” and finding weapons of mass destruction will probably remain one of his biggest policy failures. That it was committed during a global emergency with bipartisan consensus should serve as a sobering lesson for all during today’s emergency and its increasingly dogmatic Covid consensus.

Having failed at securing national identity cards, Blair has seen an opportunity with our understandable fear for our health. He now asks us to surrender our civil liberties “for the common good” by advocating for the introduction of digital domestic vaccine passports on our smartphones. The idea is that we would scan them for entry to bars, theatres, restaurants and so forth. For those who do not have a smartphone, Blair suggests that the venue could take a photo to check against a database of people who have been vaccinated. I am less animated here about such passports for international travel, since such things already exist to deal with illnesses like yellow fever, but implementing these measures domestically is an unsettling prospect.

I have been injected against my will, while in jail in Egypt. To this day I do not know what they put inside my body. Any sort of state coercion on the issue — up to and including compulsory vaccination — fills me with horror. Indeed, Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights concerns “consent”, and states (my emphasis): “Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.”

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As well as the core human rights questions involved in Blair’s suggestion to make digital vaccine passports a condition of reentry into everyday life, there is also the prevailing issue of minority mistrust. In the UK white people are more than twice as likely to have been vaccinated as black people the same age, and three times as likely as people from mixed ethnic backgrounds. There are a number of reasons for low minority uptake, but among Asians one must surely be the medical malpractice carried out during the War on Terror. As most Pakistanis know, in 2012 the CIA used a fake Hepatitis B children’s mass vaccination programme, reportedly to illegally collect DNA for intelligence purposes in the hunt for Bin Laden. Such was the outrage that the discovery of this fake vaccine programme provoked an alliance of 200 US aid groups to write to the then head of the CIA David Petraeus in protest, linking the agency’s behaviour to the ongoing polio crisis in Pakistan.

But the legacy of this fake vaccine campaign in Pakistan has understandably not been easy to overcome, and trust in public health officials and programmes has been irreversibly eroded. The Taliban promptly issued a fatwa against vaccination. The country’s polio cases among children have not recovered since. Sadly but predictably, the CIA’s actions in Pakistan formed the core justification for an armed backlash against immunisation workers, leading to 56 deaths between December 2012 and May 2014. To this day, local leaders believe that vaccination drives are Western spying programmes.

But Tony Blair’s advocacy here appears blind to any understandable concern around abuse and discrimination. The spectre of non-vaccinated minorities being turned away from shops is not one that any government should willingly embrace. And so, just as during the War on Terror we all did our bit while remaining critical of government overreach, I believe it is our duty now not to simply surrender before every encroachment being suggested.

As a piece of messaging, “no jab, no job” has much going for it. Like its progenitors “no hard hat, no work” and “no mask, no entry”, it takes an instance of risk-aversion most of us can at least see the sense in, frames it as a value-free universal truth, and adopts the threatening syntax of officialdom to convey its contempt for the public. Add to that the phrase’s enchanting monosyllabic alliteration, as well as the fact that many people will find the idea completely outrageous, and it becomes hard not to see it catching on.

But is it discriminatory? Having an unequal effect that correlates with a “protected characteristic” is not the only way for a policy to be bad, of course. But a claim on those grounds is a nuclear weapon in Employment Law — and a way for employees with less than two years’ service to attack an unfair dismissal — so it’s a good place to start.

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By Adam King

The Equality Act says there’s no discrimination if a requirement is “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. One such aim might be the requirement in Section 3 of the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974 — alluded to by both Mullins and the Telegraph’s Cabinet source — to look out for anyone whose health might be negatively affected by your firm’s activities. As for proportionality, perhaps there’ll be an exemption for pregnant women and Christian Scientists — although presumably not for BAME people, who, for reasons no one has yet plausibly explained, are on average considerably less keen on the idea of this vaccine.

But the trickiest question in the discrimination issue is the same one raised by those who would object to a ‘no jab, no job’ policy altogether: namely, is the increased risk of Covid-harm from unvaccinated plumbers sufficient to justify sacking people for refusing to undergo a medical procedure they don’t want?

Now, if we were only talking about, say, doctors and nurses, there might be a stronger argument for compulsory vaccination: the increased risk to others is greater in their case; they’re a small minority of the population; and there are, after all, many other ways to earn a living. Let’s not forget, it has long been impossible for most doctors in the UK to do their jobs without being inoculated against Hepatitis B. But it isn’t only doctors and nurses, and it isn’t only plumbers.

Almost every employer will want to reduce the risk of transmission among its customers and staff — out of an admirable sense of public duty no doubt, and also out of a desire for protection against legal claims, reduced sickness absence, and competitive advantage. And if every employer adopts the “no jab, no job” mantra, Mullins’ argument that workers who don’t comply can “go and work for someone else” rather loses its force.

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And the fact that the ‘no jab, no job’ rule could be applied to almost everyone is a strong indication that it has no intrinsic connection to most people’s jobs at all. Yes, unvaccinated plumbers, and shop assistants, and bus drivers — even tree surgeons — increase the risk of spreading the disease. But so do unvaccinated podcasters with private incomes when they stand in the queue at the post office. Why should the latter be the only kind of person we allow to make a genuinely free choice about the vaccine?

At this point we might start to wonder whether the rubric of employment law — depending as it does on a motley national collection of badly written policy documents and one-sided contracts — is really the appropriate field for planting public health requirements. Might it not be more honest for our Government to use instead the traditional system for the administration of life-ruining penalties: the criminal law?

Statutes create crimes by saying that something is “an offence”. And while those magic words open the door to harsh consequences (although mostly less harsh than being made permanently unemployable — only 5-10% of sentencings each year involve custody) they also guarantee various protections far beyond what’s available at the Employment Tribunal, let alone at an internal disciplinary hearing. The big difference is the higher standard of proof (‘sure’ rather than ‘on the balance of probabilities’) but there are many others, all of which make it much harder to convict someone of a crime than to sack them.

And it’s noteworthy in this context that the criminal law, by means of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, seeks to mitigate the dire consequence of unemployability. You can go to prison for six months and a couple of years later, if you apply for a job, you are entitled to tell them nothing about it. “How long will it be on my record?” is a question all white-collar clients ask when they’re offered a plea deal. If they were facing the sack, outside of the criminal jurisdiction — for, say, refusing a medical procedure — the answer might very well be “forever”.

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France is infected with anti-vaxxers

By John Lichfield

There’s a clear analogy here, isn’t there, with Free Speech. If everyone you might conceivably work for — manufacturers of everything from ice-cream to razor blades, every ancient Public School, every guardian of the nation’s architectural heritage – requires you to uphold “their” “values” in all visible areas of your life, you will have little choice but to comply. It might start with a particular company, or industry, with a particular need to maintain strict speech codes. Soon, others, noticing the benefits of such policies, follow suit. Before long a deep-sea diver loses his livelihood for sharing an edgy meme on Facebook.

Of course, a plumber with a barbarous social media output might not be as dangerous as a plumber with a higher-than-average chance of carrying Covid, but the principle and the process are the same: individual employers seek to reduce a potential harm by threatening dismissal, and the collective effect is of a national rule. That rule applies across the social spectrum, with potentially life-ruining consequences for transgression — though accusers need not prove anything beyond reasonable doubt — and often with little prospect of rehabilitation.

I have represented, in Professional Disciplinary Tribunals, many men and women who have said — or sent — inappropriate things. Some manage to hang on, some don’t. Those that don’t are often just as devastated by the consequences as the criminal client who has to leave the dock by the back stairs after a guilty verdict. But almost none of them have done anything they could sensibly be prosecuted for. The ever-reducing frequency with which that fatuous free-speech stick-man strip gets posted suggests that the downside of this phenomenon is beginning to sink in.

To treat these issues as something for employers’ discretion rather than as a matter of Public Law not only deprives us of the appropriate protections in the trial process, but also — and more worryingly — evades proper consideration (public and parliamentary) of the balances to be struck.

When it comes to free speech, the Law Commission is currently considering responses to its consultation on Hate Crime legislation. Some of the proposals provoked considerable alarm across the political spectrum —  particularly regarding the plan to extend hate-crime laws into private homes — but as the Chief Executive of the Index on Censorship Ruth Smeeth said, “We need to have a proper national debate if we are going to start putting restrictions on language like this.” Well quite.

As with Free Speech, so with vaccines. I hope Charlie Mullins was right when he said, winsomely, “the entire thing will very soon be a non-issue”. But in case he’s wrong, we must not allow compulsory vaccination to be quietly smuggled in through the back door in ten thousand workplace health policies. The Telegraph reported a Government source as saying that where there is an “unjustified” fear of the jab, “we have got to help people get into the right place”. I do hope that isn’t a euphemism for “force them to take it”. But if it is, there’s a right and a wrong way to attempt to do it.