It is so wonderful, a report from Delft University of Technology that calculates the effectiveness of the QR code. You can just refer to data and you don’t have to talk about the underlying principles or societal implications anymore.
The data is spat out by a model with a lot of crucial details and assumptions that may or may not be correct and various scenarios that may or may not be relevant and various inimitable graphs that people may or may not interpret correctly. And then a Number rolls out, with a capital G.
One group of people looks at the Number and says: it is quite a lot. Another group of people looks at the Number and says: That’s quite little. And the reason they look at that same Number in this way, of course, has everything to do with their view of man and the world and how far they want to go to push unvaccinated further out of society. But that’s not what the conversation is about. The conversation is about the Number: how well the corona ticket still works. The rest becomes unimportant when a ‘fact’ appears on the table.
In the House of Representatives debate last Wednesday, the word disinformation was mentioned 34 times. It is – still – the great obsession of parties such as D66 and Volt. Their main political position has been reduced to the importance of information: the persistent belief that we disagree only because one group has the correct Number and the other group does not.
According to Volt MP Nilüfer Gündogan, there was a real pandemic of disinformation. There were too many evil people throwing the wrong information into the world. The Dutch could only be united if everyone really had the right Number. Rutte neatly answered Gündogan’s questions that the national government is doing everything it can to combat disinformation, especially by sending correct information to the people. Via signs along the highway, via websites, via youth workers.
The Hague is so convinced of the importance of correct information that they have put Erasmus MC staff at the head of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. Ernst Kuipers as a beacon of apolitical science, of facts and handy graphs with those puppets that people understand, to underline the importance of vaccines. They had bright colors to visualize the Number.
It didn’t matter that the numbers in those handy visual overviews didn’t add up. In the parliamentary debate the following day, ‘the pandemic of disinformation’ was of course not about the former head of Erasmus MC. After all, he was on the right side of the political spectrum. Disinformation is only disruptive when it’s used for the wrong things – not when it’s used for the right things.
Kuipers talked himself out of it fairly simply. But there was still a bit of data in the press conference. Because Kuipers had distilled from the models of TU Delft, despite all the ifs, buts and uncertainties, that corona tickets can help as much as 15 percent in reducing infections. 5.5 million people heard it. Radio station BNR continued early, but by then the NOS had already turned away the press conference. How had 15 percent suddenly become the Number? That 15 percent fewer infections were only achieved in the “optimal situation”, when the corona admission ticket is also used at work and even in the supermarket in addition to the catering industry.
Also read: Nice, that Kuipers graph, but it wasn’t quite right
You almost heard Kuipers sigh when SP MP Hijink asked him again about the ‘Number’ during the debate. “I said exactly what I said.” In other words: the QR code works. In theory then, in a parallel universe.
There is only one thing as important as whether something works, and that is the support. So next week there will be an investigation somewhere out of the top hat that also has a Number attached to it, to underline that millions of Dutch people have a positive attitude towards the QR code. Especially now that they have received correct information from the central government at the press conference how great such a QR code does not work. As much as 15 percent.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 29 January 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 29, 2022
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