Denmark Introduces “Coronapass” To Enter Certain Buildings & Businesses
Denmark recently began requiring people to obtain a “CoronaPass.” It’s one of the first countries in Europe to do so. This pass certifies whether or not someone has been fully vaccinated. It also certifies whether someone has tested negative in the previous 72 hours, or has tested positive between two to twelve weeks prior to that, which would suggest that they’ve gained immunity to the virus from previous infection.
By Arjun Walia | Collective Evolution
Either vaccine or antibody proof now seems to be a required prerequisite to enter into certain buildings and businesses in Denmark. If someone is not fully vaccinated, their negative tests are only valid for a short period of time. People will be required to get tested every single week or multiple times a week to obtain a pass if they are not vaccinated.
The businesses that require a pass are ‘non-essential’ businesses like hairdressers, beauty salons, driving schools, restaurants, museums, theatres, and movie cinemas.
The pass is available in digital form via a smartphone app, but it will also be available in paper format as well. Apparently, the pass is just a temporary measure, but how many temporary measures, which some consider to be “authoritarian” will remain temporary?
According to Danish authorities, the pass will be required until the entire population has been offered a vaccination, but my question is what if there is a large minority, or even a majority, that refuses to take the vaccine? I guess we will have to wait and see how this all plays out.
It’s no secret that vaccine hesitancy is at an all-time high. I’ve covered what might be the top four reasons many scientists, doctors and journalists are refusing to take the vaccine, as there are legitimate evidence based concerns and it appears the mainstream still fails to have open and complete conversations about this topic. Instead of addressing concerns they are commonly labelled as “anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.”
If businesses do not comply with the pass or fail to verify whether or not patrons are carrying one, they risk a fine of at least 400 euros and up to 6,000 euros for repeated offences. Individuals who try to slip by without the pass risk a fine of about 330 euros. How authorities are going to enforce these rules remains to be seen.
Yahoo News points out:
The programme has stoked controversy however, as some Danes feel it will divide society. The anti-restriction movement “Men In Black” has organised a protest next Saturday in Copenhagen against it. Some shopkeepers also feel the screening requirement is a needless burden.
“It is an unreasonable responsibility to impose on a small business. It would have been much better if, for example, the police made inspection visits, like train ticket inspectors,” Jakob Brandt, head of a federation of small- and medium-sized businesses, told the Politiken newspaper.
Why This Is Important
The rollout of certain measures that governments around the world are starting to implement has many people concerned, especially many scientists, doctors and experts in the field who have condemned the idea.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard medical professor, epidemiologist and vaccine expert alongside Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, (two founding members of The Great Barrington Declaration) a physician and professor at Stanford Medical school recently published a piece in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) condemning the idea of vaccine passports, a measure that seems to be gaining traction in multiple countries.
That’s one of many examples, and if you can’t access their article in the WSJ you can read more about in an article I wrote summarizing it, here.
There has been wide scale disagreement amongst global citizens about the measures being taken with regards to COVID-19. On one hand, greater control, health surveillance, and centralized power is being pushed in accordance with keeping people ‘safe’ from a virus with a very high survival rate. On the other hand, people are feeling as though their personal experience and everyday view of this virus and what health effects it is really causing, don’t line up with the extreme measures. We have a split in our global community whereby many citizens’ desires and will are not being represented by the government and their decisions, and they feel as though by not participating in extreme measures, they will lose access to living life to the fullest. Furthermore, there is legitimate concern that lockdowns may be responsible for more deaths than COVID.
Can we truly accept that controlling everyone’s lives and what they can and can’t do is the best thing to do in this situation? Does this indicate the level of fear we have towards life? When things are not as black and white as they are presented to us, and when measures go against the will of so many people, should government be making recommendations instead? Why are certain viewpoints and evidence based science being suppressed and unacknowledged?
The Takeaway
Greater surveillance and measures are coming in ways we likely could have only imagined in sci-fi movies. When it comes to much of the COVID measures we’ve seen, I’m not sure people want to get comfortable with what’s being presented. While the promises of a return to normal are there, the goalpost seems to always be pushed, while other ‘experts’ claim normal will never be seen again.
The obvious response to this might be, “yes but we don’t know enough about how dangerous COVID is and that’s why these measures keep evolving.” But is this really true? This is where the frustration begins between differing perspectives as not all of us have heard the same information about COVID and thus see it as something different. We don’t have an agreed upon set of facts about things PCR testing, asymptomatic spread of COVID, treatments for COVID-19, lockdowns, masks and so on. This is the case not just with everyday citizens but with experts also.
How are those two sets of people supposed to communicate when the foundation for their discussion is completely different? Are we even recognizing how each other feels and where our ideas came from when we have these debates?
The events playing out at an everyday level invite a deeper inquiry into how our decisions are made and how our world functions. Inevitably there is complexity in all of this and judging people’s position on COVID measures is not a simple “these people are all sheep” or “these people are all conspiracy theorists”, it goes much deeper than these judgements.
We recently had a conversation in conjunction with our recently released course on overcoming bias and improving critical thinking. The talk focused on what we do when experts don’t agree. I feel this is a useful video for diving deeper on the issues we face right now in relation to this piece, you can watch it here.
This article (Denmark Introduces “Coronapass” To Enter Certain Buildings & Businesses) was originally published on Collective Evolution and is published under a Creative Commons license.