Anyone who has not had a booster and received the last vaccination more than nine months ago is no longer considered fully vaccinated as far as the government is concerned. Just visiting a cafe or sports match is no longer an option: the screen turns red after scanning the QR code. If you still want to enter, you must have tested negative or have a recovery certificate that shows that you have recovered from corona less than 180 days ago. Previously, a recovery certificate was valid for another year.
This will affect an estimated half a million vaccinated from Tuesday, Minister Kuipers of Public Health wrote in a statement this week letter to parliament. Over time, millions of other Dutch people may have to deal with it, if the second shot was given for a growing group more than nine months ago. More than half of the over 18s have received a booster so far, while more than 80 percent received two vaccinations last year.
Those younger than 18 will still have enough of the two shots, Kuipers emphasized: young people in this age are currently not offered a booster. On Friday, the Health Council will issue advice on boosting 12 to 17-year-olds.
No guarantee against contamination
Scientifically, there is a lot to argue with about the new rules. In December it was decided to align with the European rules: after six months it is time to refresh the vaccination, you then have three months to do so, otherwise no QR code. But the arrival of the omikron variant, which also infects vaccinated people, has completely messed up the rules of the game.
For example, the booster shot is no longer a guarantee against contamination with omikron. Of those who tested positive last month, 12 percent boosted shortly before. The booster shot does increase the protection against getting omikron, but ‘only’ to around 70 percent, according to just published UK figures. Moreover, that protection decreases again in the following months, up to around 50 percent. Definitely not foolproof to give someone like that a green tick ‘indefinitely’, as is the idea.
It is also completely unclear whether a proof of recovery after an infection is still such a good guarantee against corona. After all, anyone who has been infected with the delta variant can subsequently become infected with the omikron variant again. Since the arrival of omikron, the chance of reinfection has become approximately five times greater than with previous variants. according to a recent analysis.
Nevertheless, the minister is trying to make the best of it. After all, the broad outlines are clear: someone who has just been boosted is better protected than someone who has not received a booster shot. And someone who has recently had corona is better protected than someone who has remained uninfected. Do not expect a hard scientific substantiation of the chosen length of time during which a vaccination certificate is valid, the minister signs in response to parliamentary questions then several times.
It is not entirely clear how well – or how badly – someone who has been fully vaccinated but not yet boosted is protected against omikron. According to figures from the United Kingdom, someone who was fully vaccinated six months ago has somewhere between 10 and 40 percent protection against infection with the variant, and roughly 60 to 80 percent against hospitalization. The booster would roughly halve the chance of contamination, according to Israeli and British figures, and increase the protection against hospitalization to around 80 to 90 percent.
Since last Tuesday, the booster has already been used as a condition for a valid vaccination certificate for travel within the EU. The fact that the introduction in the Netherlands will take a week longer has ‘a technical reason’, according to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health. The ministry did not get the legislation in which the corona admission ticket is regulated in time. Previously, Friday was assumed to be the day on which the green check marks would expire.
Abolish corona admission ticket
Another reason for the postponement would have been that Minister Kuipers first wanted to answer open questions from the House. That answer did not yield much extra support: except for Fractie Den Haan, the entire opposition voted this week against the plan to make the booster a condition for a green tick. ‘Extremely dubious’, said Maarten Hijink of the SP, for example, who submitted the motion to dismiss the amendment that had not just been passed. He thinks it is disproportionate that people who ‘have properly had the first two vaccinations’ and who already enjoy considerable protection against hospital admission, lose their QR card.
It has not yet been decided when the corona admission ticket can be abolished in its entirety. As far as the European Commission is concerned, it is still too early, at least when it comes to travel. On Thursday, he proposed to extend the European travel certificate until the summer of 2023, because it is not yet possible to estimate how the pandemic will develop later this year. The fear is that a cluttered patchwork of entry rules would otherwise arise in Europe, should the virus go wrong again.
In the meantime, the QR code as an admission ticket is increasingly under fire from science, not least because the omikron variant makes it increasingly difficult to draw the line between who is ‘safe’ and who is not. For example, researchers from Delft and Utrecht concluded that the effect of the admission ticket calculated last month that the QR code system is a lot less effective in the current situation than before, because the variant bypasses vaccinations so easily. After all, the more the virus circulates, the more difficult it becomes to slow down the epidemic with tickets.