Bring on the Vaccine Passports

Disclaimer: as an expat and a frequent world traveler, I have a lot to gain by the institution of a globally-accepted vaccine passport system. That said, please allow me to explain why even a someone who has never left their hometown would also benefit from such a regimen.

We’re entering the Coronavirus Endgame, where we reverse-the-snap and bring life back to where it was in early 2019. Things will of course be different–they should be–but the weirdness, isolation, and fear will be gone. To extend the Marvel Avengers metaphor, the vaccines are like the first 45 minutes of Endgame, where our heroes find Thanos and kill him, only to realize nothing changes. The vaccine is not the snap; we have to figure out how to get back to normal.

Why is that? The virus isn’t going away; the current betting in the medical community is it will become endemic, like the cold and flu, always there waiting to make someone sick. Vaccines provide protection, but not perfect protection. Some people with weaker immune response will still get sick and be contagious. And we don’t know how long our immunity is good for: the clock is running, and people immunized in the early trials are still not getting sick, so we’re (just a swag here) probably good for a year, and counting. But it’s unlikely this immunity is forever, so we’ll need to keep practicing things we hated from 2020: masks and social distancing and fever checks and hand sanitizing and elbow-shakes and so forth.

So what good did vaccination do? Well, it greatly reduced the risk of getting sick/hospitalized/dying. And since there is less risk, governments may be willing to allow more mobility and fewer restrictions. The obvious implication is for international travel; right now, US citizens can travel to most of the Western Hemisphere and Africa, along with a few other locations. Likewise, few foreigners can come to the US. A viable vaccine passport could loosen those restrictions.

What about the complaint that a vaccine passport is another government restriction on our freedom? Well, it’s true, it is. In fact, it already is, and has been for almost ninety years. All governments reserve the right to refuse entry to sick people; the only difference is whether the governments are screening for illness (now they are). Many of us already have a vaccine passport: the World Health Organization (WHO) “yellow card” which was a necessary part of foreign travel for decades. If you traveled internationally back in the last millennium, or were in the US Armed Forces or Peace Corps, you have this form. So the concept is not new and not another restriction; it’s the same restriction that always was, you just either didn’t know about it, or forgot about it.

Why not just use the WHO certificate? It is a yellow piece of paper with scribbling on it, from the quaint old days when faking it was considered unlikely (“You want to go to the Amazon without a Yellow Fever inoculation? Go right ahead, and who’s your next of kin?”). Using it today would invalidate the entire concept, since any damn fool with a color printer and Photoshop could make one up.

So we need something digital and secure and updatable and widely-accepted across the globe. This is why the US federal government should be leading the charge. I would like to know what President Biden is doing about this, as it falls squarely in an area where he should be leading, but I have heard nothing about it. Why should the airlines or the EU or Israel be the places to develop this concept?

What if you don’t travel, never had the WHO card, and really don’t care if I can traipse around the globe? Fair point! You too have much to gain. As medicine continues to learn what the risks are with respect to immunity, mutation, side-effects, boosters, and transmission rates, governments will become more comfortable in relaxing some rules based on vaccination. And this will require some readily acceptable, common way to prove it: a vaccine passport. Just like the immigration officer at the airport in London, your dentist, the checkout clerk, your waiter and the baby-sitter will want to know what risk they are entailing in being near you. Will this be forever? No, because eventually people won’t care. How do we know that? Because that’s what happened to the WHO yellow cards; they have never been rescinded, most people just forgot about them, although in a few cases they are still necessary for travel (Yellow Fever being a great example).

For all those folks who are sick-and-tired of masks, your vaccine passport will become a path out of that particular hell. Now, there is no reason the passports have to be mandatory. You can refuse to get the vaccine, and just wait for herd immunity and the end of restrictions. Or, you can get the vaccine and skip getting the passport: you’ll still face restrictions, but you’ll know you are relatively safe. Or you can get the shot and the passport and breathe easy. Choice is a good thing.

Vaccine passports can be an important tool in the transition back to normalcy, both for travel and day-to-day life. And the passport won’t be forever, as I already demonstrated. Sometime in the not too distant future, your passport app will just be a memento of how things were, just like an old face-mask you’ll find crumpled up in a coat pocket. Won’t that be a great day?