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, …