It's Not Okay, None of This is Okay...

Over the last several months, governments everywhere have been rolling out their various passport schemes to drive up (coerce) vaccine uptake. I've been flamed, mostly on Twitter, for suggesting that passports were not the "get-out-of-jail" cards many people think they are. 

The evidence everywhere passports have been introduced is that they juice vaccination rates. Those who

Surrender

were lazy about it, sitting on the fence, or just unsure are strongly incentivized to get the jab. Fine. I'm all for more jabs in more arms. However, once that surge in vaccination is complete, what then for the passports? My strong suspicion is that these passports are never going away. Even where passport schemes have begun with paper cards/certificates, nearly everyone expects them to become electronic and increasingly harmonized (standards, format, etc). Moreover, I doubt these schemes will remain limited to combatting Covid-19. Technologies like this, once introduced, will be repurposed for all kinds of new "emergencies."

There are two big things that trouble me about the apparent public support for these schemes; first, the implicit acknowledgement that freedoms have been restricted and that passports are a way to get them back, and second, blaming the unvaccinated for the necessity of needing the passports at all.

We can live a life of sorts in spite or normalizing the abnormal. But doing so isn't really living. 

FAIL!... With a Side of Segregation?

FAIL!

Last night, Alberta's Premier declared a healthcare state of emergency, sent everyone back home again, and also announced the introduction of a vaccine passport scheme. I can't say I was surprised by any of this. The writing was on the wall toward the end of August as, little-by-little, ICU admissions to Alberta's fragile healthcare system began pushing it toward the breaking point. 

I've already written here about why I don't like passports as a solution. Have read nothing that changes my mind about them, but I knew that debate was essentially over by the time I penned the piece. Passports were already in operation in lots of places, so the collective acquiescence to them was bound to come here too. It's all dispiriting, but not, in my view, for the reasons I see expressed in the popular press or on platforms like Twitter. Instead, I view the resort to coercive measures like passports as an admission of complete failure on the part of our public officials to make its case to a significant portion of the population; roughly 20%-30% it seems. Importantly, this is not some sort of Alberta phenomenon. There might be greater skepticism and resistance in Alberta relative to the rest of Canada, but there are plenty of jurisdictions around the world in which the persuasive case in favour of vaccines appears to have stalled, or even failed. 

I am worried about what the inability to persuade significant numbers of people as to the virtues of vaccination says about our public institutions and where our politics are headed.

Twenty Years On...

The run-up to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has given me plenty of cause for reflection, a lot of which was made more painful by the calamitous withdraw from Afghanistan. There are an endless number of commentaries, podcasts, editorials, to be read marking the 20th anniversary. It's a period of time that will garner analysis and (bitter) debate for decades to come. There's plenty I could offer in terms of misgivings, lessons learned, failures, turning points, and what it all means for the future. It would be a very long post and, unfortunately, repeat a lot of the conflicting views being expressed already. 

Well Worth A Visit

Instead, I thought I'd try a short post that was a bit more personal, albeit probably still full of conflicting sentiment. Indeed, it's hard not to reflect on the last two decades and not be conflicted. It's a source of conflict that began on a morning in September that was exactly as beautiful as everyone says it was.

Passport to My Own Island

As the global pandemic has dragged on, momentum to introduce vaccine passports has picked up. I'm horrified. Proof of vaccination for international travel has been common for many years. But I am particularly distressed by the cavalier manner in which passport schemes have been rolled out in domestic settings. I have yet to see a thoughtful, and convincing case in support domestic passports, particularly as SARS-CoV-2 has evolved to where asymptomatic spread among the vaccinated is now commonly acknowledged and emerging research on "natural immunity" is changing how we think about the dichotomy of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated.

Me in Intellectual and Political
 No-Man's Land

Advocates have yet to think clearly about the implications of these schemes. Instead, they have become wedge issues for politicians, demarcating lines of virtue rather than those between safe and unsafe, infected and uninfected.  Passport schemes are fraught with civil liberties issues and run the risk of repeating past mistakes in which the diseased, the different, or undesirable were cast to the margins of our society. A shockingly large number of people seem perfectly fine with this.

Yet, I don't see a public health case for these things. Until I do, it's hard for me to see them as anything other than the forms of coercion and exclusion I feared back in the spring of 2020. If we are going to enter a period of coercion and health segregation, let's call it that. Let's just stop the charade and make vaccination mandatory. Then we avoid starting down a path toward mobile health monitoring that will inevitably metastasize into additional intrusions that facilitate the expansion of state power more than they address the public health issues ostensibly at their core.