Stop the Vaccine-Passport Revenge Fantasy

This is an idea that won’t die.

Let’s be absolutely clear. Even if you put aside all the privacy and constitutional concerns, vaccine passports do not allow us to reopen the economy faster. Instituting a massive bio-surveillance system would be a hugely costly security fence to wrap around the world. Many people imagine it would “open things up.” In fact, the first thing it would do is close things down, because it bars people from doing things they’ve already been doing throughout the pandemic: shopping, traveling, gathering together, attending weddings and funerals. You would be instituting new and harsher restrictions at the very time the pandemic was ending.

Second, we have no way of knowing right now whether such a system really facilitates people “reentering” normal life. By raising the costs in privacy for booking a hotel, a venue, a flight, or an Uber, we are likely to in discourage precisely the kind of economic and social activity a healthy society needs.

Third, even if you could institute such a surveillance system, it would also bar people who — for whatever reason — can’t access the vaccine, not just the anti-vaxxers who deserve punishing. They might be children, or women who are pregnant and following the advice of many authorities who don’t recommend the vaccine. It would disproportionately bar people who, for whatever reason, don’t have easy access to medical care — because they are distressed by poverty, or because they are illegal immigrants, or who just can’t get it together to get both shots at the appropriate times, or because they don’t trust the medical system. Recall the sympathy many liberals have for African Americans who express vaccine hesitancy due to mistreatment. Puerto Ricans might have a similar cultural memory about experimental drug testing (though that’s never mentioned these days).

One other note. This is absolutely the wrong battle to choose with anti-vaxxers. Trying to institute a kind of medical rider to the Bill of Rights is very likely to fail in courts if tested seriously. Trying to do so on a disease that is not particularly fatal to the young and healthy is almost a surefire way to lose. Anti-anti-vaxxers will end up establishing a precedent that will make overcoming vaccine “hesitancy” even harder if we should ever suffer a worse pandemic.

The pandemic exacerbated and generated immense resentments in America. Resentments at lockdowns for lost earnings, dreams deferred, and even lives lost due to depression and overdose. And resentments over lost loved ones, or the length of lockdowns, or at those who could conceivably have done more to stop the spread but did not. I think the drive for instituting vaccine passports at the end of the pandemic is carried by this resentment — an attempt to “single out” people and mete out punishment. After a certain level, possibly long before we run into “vaccine hesitancy” — we are likely to see transmission drop to a level that signals the end of the pandemic. A threshold we’ll likely meet even if not everyone gets vaccinated, as Harvard Medical school professor (now inexplicably flagged by Twitter) Martin Kulldorff explained:

All our history books suggest that after the great influenza, people didn’t talk about it or dwell on it. This may be the reason why.