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| 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.
Not Your Mother's Yellow Card
A common paper yellow card stamped with the list of things you're jabbed up against isn't an onerous violation of civil liberties. It is a privilege to visit other countries and the sovereign right of the country you're visiting to deny you entry for lots of reasons, one of which is to minimize prospects that you'll end up sick while in-country.
In my view, an important feature of yellow vaccination booklets are the limitations on how widely held information about your health is. Sure, paper can get lost, ink can fade, and so on. But the yellow passports are filled out and signed by authorities where you live, but afterward in your sole possession.
There's an App for That
What's being contemplated and rolled out around the world is something different. We are long-past the point of unhealthy additions to our mobile devices. Now that smart phones have as much or more computing power than your typical PC, there's hardly anything we do anymore that isn't tailored to them. Sadly, we more or less accept the necessity of mobile devices and the bottomless pit of apps available for them. More importantly, that "necessity" is often sold to us as a form of convenience and few of us seldom think about what we are giving away in exchange.
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| Electronic "Papers, Please." |
That the freedom to patronize those events prior to Covid was restricted by the state and now sold back to us in the form of Excelsior as a convenient exchange for its restoration is never given much consideration. Instead, schemes like this are mostly viewed as "get out of jail" cards. However, while the initial Excelsior Pass scheme was limited to a QR Code indicating vaccination or testing, the entire program has already morphed to Excelsior Pass Plus which now allows you to include additional information about when you were vaccinated/tested, where, and what kind of vaccine you received.
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| Someone Forgot Their Booster |
Seen this Movie Already
Coincidentally, the fever pitch of interest in passports as our way out of our Covid mess is peaking right around the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. It's an apt moment to think about the many ways we threw technology at the problem of terrorism. We'll never know for sure how much of what we did actually thwarted terrorist plots of one sort or another. However, every time a new plot was hatched, it seemed a new measure wasn't far behind as a means of combatting that specific plot.
t resources to the real threats around us.
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| Will Not Give You Money |
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| Now Accepting Health Passport Info |
A prime example of this kind of private sector activity is a firm called Clear Secure, a private firm which operates CLEAR, a domestic trusted traveller scheme like NEXUS, except that your data is taken in and stored by Clear Secure.
You'll not be surprised to learn than CLEAR is already positioning itself to accept your healthpass data as well.
Missing Rationale for Vaccine Passports
One could object to the civil liberties implications of the "Homeland Security Industrial Complex," but there was generally a coherent rationale for many of the measures put in place. Was it a disproportionate reaction that skewed risk assessments about the actual threat? Probably. Has it created a leviathan we will likely never be able to shrink? Absolutely.
The two decades since 9/11 have seen the permanent expansion of the national security state. In every corner of the country, Homeland Security is omnipresent. It's not inconceivable that we'll end up going down a similar road now that we've upended our societies to fight Covid. I haven't done a comparative risk assessment, but there are numerous comparative assessments of one's chances of dying in a terrorist attack. They're not high, yet we transformed the national security state in response. I don't think we've done a very good job assessing risk or doing cost-benefit analyses during the pandemic either. Much as our obsession with security justified the expansion of the national security state, Covid has similarly facilitated the expansion of state power.
Passports would become just one aspect of that growth. But, before we march the down road as a means of combatting Covid, I'd like to see a coherent rationale that is about public health and not coercion and power. I'm still waiting.
Vaccinated Vectors
In the spring and summer of 2020, as vaccines were still in their early stages of development, I could object to passports on privacy grounds and unease with private sector management of my health data. However, so long as there was the prospect of a real public health distinction between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, I could see the logic of passports. I was more sympathetic to them for international mobility than domestic, but I could at least see the logic.
But as what we know about Covid has evolved, the logic of preventing spread through passports has collapsed in my mind. Earlier this year, the CDC changed its recommendations around masking and social distancing flowing from an outbreak of Covid-19 during an annual Gay Pride event in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Alarming to the CDC was the fact that there were hundreds of Covid-19 infections in a population that was more than 70% vaccinated. Indeed, among those who experienced symptoms, nearly 80% were fully vaccinated. Only 4 people were ill enough to be hospitalized, and no one died.
In my personal opinion, the key news from this event was the ability of vaccines to keep people out of the hospital. The CDC, on the other hand, was alarmed by spread of Covid among the vaccinated. Since then, there's been considerable hysteria around the misnamed "breakthrough" infections among the vaccinated.
Early proponents of vaccine passports assumed there was little transmission of Covid from those who were already vaccinated. Current research suggests the vaccinated are less of a spread threat than the unvaccinated, but this potentiality undercuts a central claim in support of passports.
Natural Immunity
One of the other problems for proponents of passports is a growing body of research looking into the enduring immunity among those who have been naturally infected with Covid. Indeed, it seems immune systems of many of those who've recovered from Covid mounted a significant, and enduring, immune response; a response that may actually be longer-lived than immunity induced by vaccines. How do passport proponents plan to work this into their scheme? We don't have conclusive evidence as to whether the naturally infected actually need vaccines, but vaccine passports that do not incorporate acquired immunity will marginalize a significant number of people who are just as unlikely to clog hospital ICUs as the vaccinated.
Just Mandate, and Be Done With it.
In addition to complaining about passports on this blog, I've been pleading with Twitter to offer up a rationale for passports. I won't make examples of anyone here by posting the responses I have received, but most of them maintain there remains a public health rationale for passports anchored in slowing the spread. It's as if the knowledge base from which they are working hasn't incorporated "breakthrough" infections among the vaccinated. What difference will a passport make to slowing the spread if, after you've admitted the vaccinated to your restaurant, they spread "breakthrough" infection to each other, and then all resume their circulation as vectors throughout the community?
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| Not What We Think They Are |
Passport schemes are not going to solve the problem people think it will. Indeed, they are mostly indirect forms of segregation and coercion that will dump responsibility for enforcement onto lots of non-government entities; service sector in particular.
I've seen it argued that vaccination status could be managed like smoking. There are currently lots of limitations on where you can smoke, almost all of which are outside. But vaccine passports are not the same. When you need to step out for a cigarette, you do so and are then free to return. Vaccine passports will limit access to some form of normalcy only to the vaccinated. The unvaccinated will not be able to "re-enter" at any point.
Analogy to prohibiting smoking is the dumbest argument I’ve seen yet for this. You can go outside for a smoke, then return. Not so with vaccine passport scheme. You’re barred. Full stop. By definition passports aim to discriminate. https://t.co/OQR12yYv3a
— Greg Anderson 😄 (@AnderPoli) August 25, 2021
If we are going to coerce people to get vaccinated, let's just cut to the chase and mandate it. All I see in passport schemes is scope for abuse, particularly when the public health rationale for them is thin. There are lots of legal and ethical reasons governments have historically resisted mandates, but I don't see the practical difference between them and passports.
Passports vs. Mandates? Seems like a distinction without a difference..... The Economist explains – Why don’t governments make covid-19 vaccines mandatory? https://t.co/FiGHgsqGjz
— Greg Anderson 😄 (@AnderPoli) September 6, 2021
Medical Segregation
Part of my concern about the prospect for abuse is the way in which humans have historically used health care and medicine as the basis for marginalizing groups of people. If you think that's all ancient history, consider how recently we decided eugenics programs were inappropriate? Sadly, medicine has had some important ethical lapses. Rather than link to a long list of them, I have embedded a recent Tweet from Martin Kulldorf of Great Barrington Declaration fame. For some, his association with Barrington is enough to get him (and me) dismissed as a QAnon quack. Whatever!
What's interesting about his Tweet was the way a clever falsehood suggesting we've never blamed the diseased for our problems generated an avalanche of responses to the contrary.
Yes, that second sentence is incorrect. Good catch everyone. Blaming disease carriers has a long awful history. I thought most public health people opposed blaming, shaming and ostracizing. Now it is public health policy. https://t.co/Al9UXnMOmD
— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) August 25, 2021
Illiberal Democracy
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| Waiting. mask on, for Uber Eats to Deliver Some Humble Pie |
For that, I would happily eat humble pie!!!! Until then, I'll waiting by myself on my intellectual and political island.
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