Britain’s socialised healthcare system reportedly falsified up to 700,000 vaccine passport records since the beginning of the controversial programme, resulting in many Britons being barred from leaving the country.
In a massive example of government incompetence, health officials at the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) recorded false data in hundreds of thousands of vaccine passports. With Boris Johson’s government planning to introduce health pass requirements for nightclubs and other large public venues by the end of September, the failures have further thrown into question the efficacy of the draconian scheme.
According to a freedom of information request conducted by The Telegraph, the NHS was forced to correct 677,331 vaccine records and there were 112,939 instances in which data had to be deleted due to duplication or correction errors.
It is likely that the number of errors from the socialised healthcare system is in fact much higher, as the need for corrections were only flagged after individuals tried to use the NHS coronavirus app to travel abroad, meaning many more are likely to be unaware of their vaccine records being faulty.
To deal with the massive failures, the NHS has created a Vaccination Data Resolution Service. A job advertisement has said the position will aim to “support citizens resolving problems they encounter with their Covid-19 vaccination records” and to help “citizens to prove their Covid-19 vaccination status in line with UK Government guidance”.
An NHS spokesman did not deny the scale of the record failures but said: “The vast majority of updates made to vaccination records by NHS digital do not relate to people’s vaccine status.
“The NHS is proactively contacting people who have been vaccinated in England and are showing an incomplete record so their records can be urgently corrected.”
In response to the vaccine passport errors, the landlord of the Three Colts & The Owl Pubs — a signatory to the Together declaration against health papers — Adam Brooks said: “So, they are not just discriminatory, divisive, trouble-causing, business & society destroying… they are simply unworkable and [sic] unsecure.”
Concerns have previously been raised that the national healthcare system would not be capable in safeguarding privacy with the proliferation of health passes.
In April, former Brexit Secretary David Davis warned that the nation’s socialised healthcare system was too “incompetent” to keep data safe.
The veteran Yorkshire MP said: “The health service has always been very, very incompetent, bluntly, at handling private data.
“Every time it tries to do something that is online or involves a long-range connection it loses data. It’s happened half a dozen times in the last ten years,” Davis added.
In response to the latest failures, the leading Brexiteer said on Tuesday: “This is yet another example and is a further reason vaccine passports must not be introduced for domestic settings.”
Speaking to Breitbart London in March, the CEO of the online privacy firm DeleteMe, Rob Shavell warned that it is all but impossible to keep vaccine passport data secure.
“Time and time again governments say that they are providing a data service to their citizens and claim that it will be protected, but what we see is this information ending up in data profiles available on Google searches,” he said.
“The systems we have are too complicated and once that data gets digitised and out there and replicated in the country’s database that you are travelling to, with its own set of privacy protocols, you are looking at an expanding universe” of data that cannot be kept secure, the DeleteMe CEO explained.
Mr Shavell went on to predict that the potential data leaks could lead to “algorithmic discrimination” in which “decisions are being made without our knowledge just because it was easy to sort and categories us as late to the vaccine, early to the vaccine, non-vaccinated… all of this information becomes easy to compare and sort against.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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