As the Covid crisis subsides, countries in Europe are opening up again, one by one. It is now clear the omicron variant is much less health-threatening than the delta variant, but also
both vaccines and natural immunity have played a role in getting Europe through.
During the last few months, the
responses by European countries have been rather different. While the UK didn't do all that much really, Sweden lightly
reverted on its «no lockdown» policy, while a number of countries, from Belgium to Greece, introduced extra lockdown measures, with the Netherlands going the furthest.
One important measure which most EU member states had in place was the vaccination passport, used to prevent people that are not vaccinated - sometimes even when they had been tested negative - to obtain access to bars, restaurants, sports and culture facilities - and sometimes even
public transport.
It cannot be sufficiently repeated how such vaccine passports were not backed up by science, for the simple reason that those that are vaccinated are still able to pass on the virus, as the value of the vaccines was mainly to suppress the symptoms of illness.It is still hard to believe how European politicians could get away with introducing severe restrictions for the non-vaccinated part of the population without sufficient evidence that this actually boosted protection. To be fair, vaccinated people are less contagious than the non-vaccinated, but by no means to a degree that can ever justify the intrusive vaccine passport system.
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