No to Vaccine Passports

V accine passports, which have been introduced or promised in over half the American states, are a backdoor attempt to give digital control over the most intimate details of our lives to government minders. And they need to be opposed by everyone who can think two steps ahead — whether they be conservatives, liberals, progressives, Mugwumps, or Shaysites still hiding out in the hills of western Massachusetts.

The first reason to do so is that we simply have no idea what a vaccine passport means in practice — nor even what the vaccine will be in the end. Will it be three doses? Four? Or two plus a proven previous infection? We do not know what the passports will restrict users from accessing. Their jobs? Public amenities? The very health-care services that progressives otherwise deem a human right? A vaccine passport is just a system of control, to do what and for what purpose TBD.

That’s rather the point.

It has to be said that vaccine passports work very differently from one country to the next. I’ve seen this myself. During a recent visit to Ireland, waitstaff at restaurants and bars would ask to see proof of vaccination and would often accept a cursory flash of a photo of a card on a cellphone — with no attempt to really examine the name on the card and match it to a photo ID. In New York City, the process is more punctilious and slightly less pleasant as a result. In Australia, friends inform me it is a digital pass and card that, as Helen Andrews points out, tracks and logs your movement through the world and is now being used by police for criminal investigations entirely unrelated to the pandemic. This form of surveillance will discourage people from, you know, living their lives, even as it proves a bonanza for the data-management firms that are lobbying for its expansion.

Even if we cannot know what a vaccine passport means in a week, we do know that a war on infectious disease is an unlimited war, taking as its battlefield all human sociality. Every breath in an elevator, every conversation at a restaurant, every kiss becomes a potential site of conflict. In the United Kingdom, at the depths of the pandemic, this was quite literal. “Sex banned indoors for Tier 2 couples living apart, No 10 confirms” read one headline, giving the impression that, with a nod, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had just legally compelled all the would-be bonkers in one section of London to take their business to the safety of a garden or balcony, where he could spy them like King David looking on Bathsheba. The war on mitigating risk is endless, and it will, in the end, cost us our liberties, our way of life, and our souls.

“They are not planning on removing vax passports once introduced. This is just the first step to get you conditioned to accepting government restrictions in your daily life via your mobile phone. This digital ID is going to expand to all aspects of your life,” said Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Sure, she’s crazy and went on to call this passport “Biden’s Mark of the Beast.” But she’s also right. New York State is already “exploring how the platform could be retrofitted to verify other types of records and credentials,” according to a report from Vox.

We should have learned this from our experience in the War on Terror. Because the tactic of “terror” can never sit down on a battleship and sign an unconditional surrender, the security apparatus, legal constructs, and states of exception that come with an active war become perpetual. Airport security has only become more invasive in the last 20 years. And the only way of relieving oneself of the delays and hassle is to hand over more biometric data, consent to more monitoring.

The reductio ad absurdum of War on Terror risk mitigation was the American practice of “signature strikes,” in which a death sentence was meted out from a drone, based on profile characteristics. Are the figures on satellite imagery suitably male and roughly the ages that correlate with militancy? Fire away. In the end, it was CIA director John Brennan, the voluble, cantankerous, conspiracy-addled Obama official who — by himself — made the life-or-death judgments for others. The idea of this power passing to a Republican administration spooked the Obama administration so much that they hastily drew up some rules for killing people.

If one’s vaccine passport suddenly ceases to allow entry into one place or another, or if its data is mistaken, to whom or what would a citizen appeal? None of these details have even been broached in public, let alone debated. No election has been won to give a mandate for such a vast system of control. And why should we trust those whose view is that the punishments for disobedience ought to be loss of livelihood and access to medical care? Fear of disease — a disease that policy has been unable to control in America and most of Europe — is leading normally sensible people into becoming moral monsters who think that by scapegoating a state or demographic, they can appease the disease somehow.

The only argument for vaccine passports offered has been the existence in some institutions — primary schools and colleges — of required immunization records. Indeed, we do have these, and travel to some countries occasionally requires immunization. But these were paper records, logged once and forgotten about — not a system of control that is meant to evolve and grow endlessly.

The argument for treating all citizens like children applying to school is also chilling in itself. It is the argument for a full-blown Chinese-style social-credit system. Parents confine children to their rooms for noncriminal offenses. But governments in the free world aren’t supposed to do that to adult citizens. Yet, in the “lockdowns of the unvaccinated,” that is precisely what free nations such as Austria and Germany have attempted.

We also grade children’s efforts — their penmanship, their comportment in class, and their studiousness. That we do so while raising children is not an argument for imposing grades and offering nudges and incentives for every tiny bit of behavior that can be logged by our phones.

The very justification for separating vaccinated from unvaccinated people — to stop the spread — has evaporated in light of the fact that new variants have entirely escaped the anti-transmission effects of the vaccine. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, has announced the new rationale: punitive spite. “I really want to piss them off,” he said of people who refuse the vaccine. Helen Andrews is right. The time to stand up against this is now.