England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says • Hacker News Board

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#261

Post by isoskeles » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

tonfa wrote: post #249

isoskeles wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verification apps should check the issuer. But you can issue and sign your own vaccine codes trivially. Some apps will go a step further to check that the issuer is “trusted.” For example, there is a good list of issuers considered trusted here: https://github.com/the-commons-project/vci-directory/blob/ma... The most popular reader app I know of will mark issuers that are not on this list as “Partially-verified.” I’m…

This seems odd given that EU+CH did implement things properly wrt to cryto and trusted certs, but yes I guess there's a possibility that UK messed it up :)

Oh yeah, I don’t know exactly what they’re doing in UK. SMART Health Card is an open standard that requires using ES256 for signing (more here: https://spec.smarthealth.cards/).

I assumed we were just talking about SHC, but UK could do something outside that standard. These all look the same, like a QR code, but the underlying structure could be different. I believe NY’s Excelsior Pass is also doing something slightly different, although I won’t claim it has anything to do with the signing aspect.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#262

Post by amanaplanacanal » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

kuraudo wrote: post #196

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with the simplest: tobacco. There is no way to make it disappear, you can only make it illegal. Our experiments with making other addictive drugs illegal had been a complete failure, I doubt you could even find convincing research that shows that making them illegal has led to less deaths due to them. Whereas vaccine passports appear to actually work. That is a major difference.

I take issue with this comparison: just because the prior 'experiments' have been failures does not mean that future efforts which utilize entirely different methods will be. The war on drugs was already highly criticized for its ineffectiveness on several accounts: there is definitely a way to eradicate the problem, but those were not it and even people at the time knew it.

What methods would you suggest? My parent said "ban tobacco".

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#263

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #231

howinteresting wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pfizer vaccine has already received full FDA approval, and Moderna is expected to get it shortly.

While this is technically true, it's only because the FDA abandoned all previous procedure for full approval.

[deleted]

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#264

Post by toyg » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #221

edent wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We regularly show papers for everyday activities - library card for reading books, ID for a hotel stay, driving license for driving a car, ID to pickup a parcel etc. I don't think you live in the UK - because none of those things are true. You can go into just about any library and read a book without showing a library card. I've never had to show ID for a hotel stay. My driving licence stays at home. If I want to…

> If I want to hire a car, I generate a one-time code. The GP comment said "driving a car," not hiring one. It's not clear to me why you responded to a different assertion, and I can't find anything that supports the idea that you don't need to show a driving license while driving if it's requested. https://www.gov.uk/stopped-by-police-while-driving-your-righ... "If you do not have these documents with you, you have…

> You’re breaking the law if you do not show the requested documents within 7 days

Many people might also not know that it's against the law to carry a driving licence that is not perfectly up-to-date regarding your address details.

Coming from Italy, a country with strong ID card requirements (because of Napoleonic attitudes compounded by actual Fascism), the UK situation looks to me idealistic, naive, pragmatically disastrous, and only very occasionally safer (ID-card fraud in Italy is an actual problem the UK does not have, but the practice of validating identity with house bills in the UK is even more open to abuse). I expect we'll eventually get something that works like an ID card, looks like an ID card, but it's not called an ID card - possibly owned and operated by banks, who are the real authorities here.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#265

Post by toyg » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

edent wrote: post #251

vinay427 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I want to hire a car, I generate a one-time code. The GP comment said "driving a car," not hiring one. It's not clear to me why you responded to a different assertion, and I can't find anything that supports the idea that you don't need to show a driving license while driving if it's requested. https://www.gov.uk/stopped-by-police-while-driving-your-righ... "If you do not have these documents with you, you have…

I don't need to show my licence to get in my car and drive. For any normal use of a car, there is no requirement to show a licence before doing so. Have you ever applied for a library card? Most libraries will give you one without any verifiable form of ID. And the card itself certainly isn't ID.

> I don't need to show my licence to get in my car

It would likely be difficult to buy a car without it, and obviously you could not rent it (yes, code and blabla, it's just a proxy for it).

> Have you ever applied for a library card?

Yes, and in fact they were pretty fastidious with validating that I lived in the area they serve (that might be because I have a funny accent, but still). I don't remember how I managed to get it, eventually - likely with the usual utility bills, which here work exactly as ID would, as long as you have a pair of them. Their use for this is extremely problematic.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#266

Post by junon » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #260

junon wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expedited approval in the middle of a pandemic is not the same as "abandoning all previous procedure".

Except that it is. They were already able to distribute the product under EUA. The push for 'full approval' was entirely political. What's the bar for full approval? Whatever the FDA says it is. Usually that includes convening the advisory committee. That didn't happen. Recently, 3 members resigned from said committee. While these resignations weren't about the vaccines, they were about a lack of trust in FDA (interi…

> If you want to continue to believe everything is just okie-dokie, knock yourself out

Seeing as how I'm in Germany and I have close friends at RKI, I choose to believe them - as they are unequivocally the experts on the topic - over American politics.

> but you're not going to convince anyone.

Please argue in good faith next time.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#267

Post by nobodyandproud » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

angelzen wrote: post #250

nobodyandproud wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we have laws to hold people accountable when under the influence, they do something bad and affect someone else. That’s a fantastic idea: Start holding the unvaccinated criminally responsible, if they’re the likely point of infection for someone else. Thanks for the idea.

Vaccinated people also spread covid. The #1 population-level defense against infection disease is self-isolation on symptoms onset. It is possible that vaccinated people spread covid more aggressively than unvaccinated, because the vaccines dull the symptoms to a point where they don't trigger the 'stay at home' signal anymore.

That’s like saying sober drivers can cause accidents.

It’s the likelihood, and willful the personal choice that leads to a higher of incident which society decides whether or not to tolerate.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#268

Post by 0-_-0 » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

belter wrote: post #91

libertine wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even take your comment seriously.

Look at the active cases graph starting at 8 Aug and the line to latest 10 of Sep. In approximately 45,000 cases there is a variation of -/+ 2000 is that not basically a straight line? Also what I mean by there is no correlation between deaths and the vaccination program, and there, I could have been a bit clear in my explanation, is the following: Again looking at the active cases diagram between 3 of March and 15 o…

Look at case fatality rate in Portugal:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

It dropped off a cliff from 2.9% at its highest to about 0.5% today.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#269

Post by shkkmo » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #16

Ekaros wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly only true solution to stop spread is permanent lockdown. And ban bars, restaurants, events and any sort of gatherings forever. I believe all pro-vaccine people already agree that no sacrifice of freedoms is too big for greater good. After all, why wouldn't they support keeping the vulnerable safe? Cost is only small sacrifice in bodily autonomy and clearly most effective thing to do.

Well, of course it’s mostly about sacrifices other people have to make. You know, ‘I don’t go to festivals so I don’t mind if they’re banned’. But ‘it’s inconvenient if my children are quarantined from school so that should be lenient’.

The benefits of society from in person education are so much higher than the benefit of music festivals that your comparison is absolutely ridiculous.

A better comparison would be churches and bars.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#270

Post by tomatocracy » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #221

edent wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We regularly show papers for everyday activities - library card for reading books, ID for a hotel stay, driving license for driving a car, ID to pickup a parcel etc. I don't think you live in the UK - because none of those things are true. You can go into just about any library and read a book without showing a library card. I've never had to show ID for a hotel stay. My driving licence stays at home. If I want to…

> If I want to hire a car, I generate a one-time code. The GP comment said "driving a car," not hiring one. It's not clear to me why you responded to a different assertion, and I can't find anything that supports the idea that you don't need to show a driving license while driving if it's requested. https://www.gov.uk/stopped-by-police-while-driving-your-righ... "If you do not have these documents with you, you have…

As that link says, you do not need to routinely carry your driving licence in the UK even if driving. If stopped, you are required to give your name and address and police have the option of giving you a "presenter", a notice that you must turn up at a police station within 7 days with your licence (with some exceptions eg it's been stolen or with the DVLA for changes to be applied). But in my experience it's unusual to be given one of these.