Vaccine passports may not be the silver bullet that they seem
Lesson summary
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Coming up today: Have you heard the term “vaccine passport”? It’s the idea that once you get a vaccine, you can use a smartphone app to return to your pre-COVID lifestyle of travel, concerts, and moving around without a mask. But vaccine passports are not the magic bullet that they seem like. That’s what we’ll talk about on today’s lesson.
Vaccine passports: useful, but not a panacea
Imagine a world where bands play in packed concert halls, bar patrons push and shove through the crowd to get another round, and nobody is wearing a mask. Is it 2019? Nope: it’s 2021, in Israel, where every adult over the age of 16 is eligible to get a COVID vaccine and where 90 percent of people age 50 and older have gotten at least their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Israel has sprinted to lead the world in vaccinating its citizens, but still not everyone has the vaccine. Despite all the progress, COVID is real in Israel. So how are restaurants and movie theaters packed again? The patrons all have a vaccine passport: they can prove, via a smartphone app, that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. If you can’t show a green verification screen at the door, you can’t go through the door.
Governments around the world are considering whether vaccine passports can accelerate the return to normal in their countries. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor; Joe Biden, the American President; and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, have all expressed some support for the idea. Singapore and China already use them. The promise is tantalizing, but can vaccine passports live up to the hype?
Let’s start with what they can probably achieve. Most countries have a way to officially certify that an individual has been vaccinated; the problem is that this is mostly paper-based and that each country has its own system. A globally-accepted smartphone app could collect those certificates, so a businessman could board a plane in Tokyo, a punter could enter a pub in England, and a fan could enter a baseball stadium in Chicago.
This would also take some weight off the shoulders of businesses like shops, restaurants, bars, and concert halls. Today, they have to follow extensive rules about social distancing, masks, and capacity limits. With a passport program, most—if not all—of those rules would be replaced with just one rule to follow: everyone who comes in needs a vaccine. That would simplify the decision-making for business owners.
So what’s not to like? Plenty, as it turns out. First of all , for a vaccine passport program to be successful, it must be difficult to fake. But investigators in Europe have already discovered a black market in fake vaccination records, and the smartphone app in Israel was easily hacked at the outset.
Second, there are real concerns about privacy. If a government agency administers the app, that government would potentially have access to monitor your movement as you check in at bars, restaurants, public transportation, and airports. In Singapore, the government promised the data would only be used for heath verification; it was later discovered the police were using the smartphone app data to solve crimes. It can be a slippery slope .
A passport system would also raise some thorny ethical questions. Some people cannot get a vaccine for medical reasons. Should they be excluded from social life? Should they be denied a job? In countries where the vaccine is scarce, a vaccine passport system would make a vaccine so much more valuable. That would tempt people to try to cheat the system—young people to cut in front of the elderly, say, or for hospital administrators or politicians to prioritize their friends.
Here’s another question. Let’s say a new COVID mutation is discovered. Shortly after the new mutation comes out, it’s not clear whether vaccinated people would be immune to the new variant. So what then? Is everyone’s passport not valid until more is known about the new variant? What if different vaccines work differently against a new variant? The possibilities are endless.
But perhaps the biggest argument against an elaborate vaccine passport program is that it might turn out to be pointless. Here’s why: Britain, the US, Israel, and Canada will all have enough vaccine doses for their entire populations by mid-year. If enough of a country’s residents have a vaccine, or have had the disease, then that population will reach herd immunity and the disease will slow significantly or stop entirely. If that’s the case, then a vaccine passport system won’t be necessary, except in a brief period of time while the population is being vaccinated.
The best argument for a vaccine passport system is for international travel or for countries that will take a long time to vaccinate their whole populations. Many countries in the developing world may not reach herd immunity until 2023 or beyond. Some of those countries rely on tourism; they may want to be able to welcome international tourists without putting their own populations at risk. Likewise, countries with high vaccination rates may want to open their borders again—but only to vaccinated foreigners.
So the idea would be useful for jumpstarting international travel. Luckily, international travel already has a good infrastructure in place for verifying identities: airlines and immigration officials already check for passports and visas. In some countries, they even check for vaccines against diseases like yellow fever. The International Air Travel Association, a trade group of airlines and travel agents, is already working on a way to integrate vaccine status into the process of booking a flight and checking in at the airport.
Another advantage: preparedness
I hope I didn’t sound too pessimistic about the vaccine passports. There is one good thing that can come out of this. If the world is able to develop a decent vaccine-verification system—one that is secure, universal, and not abused by government—and I realize that’s a big if—but if that exists, then it would be ready the next time something like this happens. Talk about pessimistic! I’m not predicting another killer disease, but it would be nice to have a global system ready in case there’s another virus or another health-related issue that could impact moving around.
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