Should America Consider “Vaccine Passports?”
“Vaccine Passports” are a certification of vaccination that would allow the inoculated to gain access to places closed to the non-inoculated. While it’s not likely to be a national policy anytime soon, should Americans adopt it at the state level?
The pandemic has already inordinately affected people on the basis of race, gender, and socioeconomic status, and vaccine appointments are disproportionately being taken up by white Britons and those from more affluent areas. By making a return to normal social activity contingent on vaccination, natural immunity, or a negative COVID-19 test, those inequalities could be ingrained further.
As tens of millions are inoculated against Covid-19, officials in places as diverse as New York state, Israel and China have introduced “vaccine passports,” and there’s talk of making them universal… The vaccine passport should [.] be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination.
Ensuring that a person’s vaccination status can be verifiable and visible through documentation would be an important tool for lifting quarantines and defeating COVID-19. Like the scars of the past, vaccine passports could help Americans to finally bring this pandemic to an end.