New findings are weakening the rationale for segregating people based on their vaccination status.
New findings are weakening the rationale for segregating people based on their vaccination status.
S hould we have a medical backstage pass to access normal life? Let’s follow Denmark and ditch this idea, rather than France, which is embracing it and reaping a whirlwind of protest and dissension.
Some U.S. cities such as New York and Honolulu have begun implementing vaccine-passport systems. Iowa is trying one as well. Major outlets are running stories hoping that Big Tech companies such as Google and Apple can provide a verifiable system.
A number of other countries have introduced them as well. France’s is the most strict — public transport, and all restaurants, cafes, and theaters are required to accept only people over 18 who are passport holders. France has very high anti-vax or vax-skeptical sentiments, and the system has provoked massive protests. Israel abandoned and then reinstated its Green Pass system and is contemplating updating it to require booster shots. The United Kingdom has provided a vaccine app on phones but doesn’t require private institutions to check them.
I had a little experience with a vax-passport system in Ireland this August. Restaurants and pubs were required to take contact information for contact-tracing purposes. Proof of vaccination was required to sit indoors in restaurants and pubs that wanted to follow the rules. Private clubs on big days weren’t always so scrupulous. But the scrutiny given to U.S. documents or to screenshots of vaccination cards presented on phones was cursory and would have been trivially easy to game or evade.
While the rationale for vaccination remains strong for adults and the vulnerable, the logic of vaccine passports is starting to crumble even as the system is expanding.
The CDC showed with its own numbers that the current variant infects vaccinated people, and vaccinated people “have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.” Vaccinated people get and transmit the virus. Studies from Israel seem to suggest that those with natural immunity — having contracted and survived COVID — have more protection from serious illness than those who are vaccinated, especially those who were vaccinated early. Other studies from Israel show a waning effect of the vaccines.
These findings seriously complicate the medical rationale for segregating people based on their vaccination status alone. Australia’s government had hoped that a vaccine passport “would give us all confidence to actually engage in a lot of these broader activities that maybe we’re a little bit nervous about at the moment.” But arguably a person with natural immunity — even if unvaccinated — is safer to be around. If vaccinated people can become infected rather easily and spread just as widely, the vaccine passports don’t contain the spread. Vaccinated people will likely get less sick and overcrowd hospitals — though the waning effect of vaccination is worrisome on this note — but vaccinated people may go from their roped-off events and spread among the unvaccinated in other, less-restricted contexts.
And so the rationale for vaccine passports has to be bolstered with coercive or moral content. On the coercion side, a vaccine passport will simply hassle some undetermined number of people who aren’t particularly moved one way or the other about vaccines to go ahead and get them. The moral side is simply that after having lived through the miseries of this 18-month period, it would satisfy people to exclude or otherwise punish those who are lax about the vax.
A serious attempt to impose a heavily restrictive vaccine-passport system nationwide would mean excluding people from activities they’ve already been doing the past 18 months, even as the danger of the pandemic to our medical institutions is less now than it was in the past. It would inspire and harden a resistance movement similar to the one France is undergoing.
The psychological exhaustion with the pandemic is now very real. What the United States needs is some kind of reassurance that the COVID era can come to an end. That “normal life” will return and that the risks of living life in a biological world with a functioning human society will be shifted back onto individuals, families, and free institutions. Eighteen months of moving goalposts has made each new development — in the variants of the disease, or in the studies done on the effect of vaccination — a fresh trial and stress.
Reassurance of a return to normal life is something that the Danish government provided its citizens throughout the pandemic and just delivered in the past week. Denmark tried a corona passport for nonessential services. But it is now ending all COVID restrictions, including the passport. And it’s important to note that even though Denmark has vaccinated a higher percentage of its eligible population than the United States has, it did not wait for daily cases to drop to their lowest-ever levels before declaring that the virus was no longer “a critical threat to society.”
That is what must be the standard — the standard that justified the beginning of pandemic restrictions. A novel virus has the potential to overwhelm a health-care system, as we saw in Lombardy and Wuhan, and nearly in New York and London, in the first months of this crisis. That threat is nearly over. And it is a reason why we should not be building an invasive and constitutionally dubious system of internal passports now.