Vaccine passports would extend the miseries of COVID well into a time when the vaccine has largely obviated them.
They would extend the miseries of COVID well into a time when the vaccine has largely obviated them.
G overnor Andrew Cuomo is piloting a program in which New Yorkers will get an “Excelsior Pass,” which would function as an internal COVID passport. It would put a secure QR code on your phone or a printed sheet of paper, confirming you had the vaccine or a recent negative COVID test, allowing you to enter spaces. If you want to get into Madison Square Garden to see the Knicks or into the Barclay’s Center to see the Nets, you need to create a relationship between your medical data, IBM, your phone, and the NBA. Cuomo hopes it will fast-track reopening.
This is a bad idea.
Unfortunately, it’s everywhere now. After Cuomo announced his plan, the news cycle seems to be turning toward the subject in earnest. Debates about COVID vaccine passes are starting in Europe. Even Lord Jonathan Sumption, one of the most prominent British critics of lockdowns, seems to be resigned to vaccine passports, seeing them as the “least bad thing” — and the only way to avoid depriving everyone of access to normal life again. He sees it as the least intrusive and least coercive measure. This is wrong, too.
Vaccine passports for COVID-19 would be a massive disruption to normal life and would introduce a complete anomaly into the West — the need to show one’s papers, papers containing intimate information — to gain access to what we’ve heretofore thought of as public accommodations.
Strangely, these passports would be dramatically raising the standards for access to normal life while dramatically lowering the bar for coercion. The new COVID vaccines may be medical miracles, but they aren’t even FDA-approved in the traditional sense. They are approved for emergency-use authorization only. There are tens of millions of people — namely, children — who cannot access them. Will they be deprived of the return to normal life? And for how long?
While some nations require proof of vaccination for entry, they do so for diseases that are extremely perilous, such as yellow fever, not for diseases like COVID-19, which are serious but in the vast majority of cases not life-threatening.
Vaccine passports are yet another attempt to move the cruel COVID-era goalposts. We were told that lockdowns would be a few weeks to alter the curve. Then that we were waiting for a vaccine. Vaccine passports would require an enormous infrastructure, a change of political culture, and approval for use of the vaccine for every living human in the country. Even then it would create a kind of medical apartheid.
The rejoinder — anti-vaxxers deserve to be outcasts — isn’t even responsive. Many people may fail to get the vaccine for a variety of reasons over which they have no control. Vaccine hesitancy is not just a product of rich wealthy white GOP subscribers, or of white Evangelicals. It’s also a serious impediment to high vaccination rates in the black community and among some immigrant groups. The imposition of a COVID passport would be another avenue for reinforcing precisely the forms of inequality we’re supposed to oppose. Despite their recent successful ventures in an authoritarian society, the NBA isn’t requiring all players get the vaccine — because there is real hesitancy among some players to take it. Do we really think it’s sustainable to expect all their fans to get one if the players do not?
Vaccine passports are a tech-funding bonanza in search of a mandate or social reason. The idea of health passports has been pushed by entrepreneurs in the med-tech community. Last year, a creepy video pushing the idea with the quasi-authoritarian tone of a dictator came from an Irish company, ROQU Group. IBM’s involvement in New York is surely due to its lobbying. Health-passport entrepreneurs hope to be paid by governments, and by private clients.
Health passports are also unnecessary. Normal life is slowly returning to the United States and the United Kingdom, well before vaccine passports are needed to facilitate it. In a few days, my own parish church, in a deep blue part of a deep blue state, will be free of all state restrictions on the number of people it can have, though we will likely continue distancing and masking for just a bit.
Creating a vaccine passport would extend the miseries of COVID well into a time when the vaccine has largely obviated them. It will create a massive constituency — made of rent-seeking tech companies, and of hypochondriacs — for extending that system’s reach and for adding more medical disclosures to the list of conditions of entry to a diner or a baseball game. It will delay the reunions of families across states, and across borders.
After World War II, British subjects were still asked to show their wartime-era identity cards. It was a ridiculous hassle, and it ultimately inspired a movement for burning them in protest, and for disrespecting prosecutions of those who were unable to show their papers. Let’s ditch this idea before it gets started.