About Those Vaccine Passports...
Do we need them? Will states be interested in providing them? Will businesses implement them? My guess - no.
Now that COVID vaccines are becoming widely available to individuals over the age of 16, the US is entering the weird phase of figuring out how to manage the time between the present and the hopefully not far off future of herd immunity. One proposed solution is a “vaccine passport”, either a piece of paper or a smartphone app that would provide proof of vaccination to any business or venue that requires patrons to be vaccinated before entry.
As you may have noticed, this idea has not been met with universal approval.
A good way of prefacing my thoughts on vaccine passports is to explain one of my main reasons for getting vaccinated -- once my second jab kicks in, I don’t have to give a damn what anyone else does. The Pfizer vaccine, the one I am receiving, has a 97% efficacy rate in reducing symptomatic infection and a 94% efficacy rate in reducing asymptomatic infection. In layman's terms, that means the chances of you getting me sick or me getting you sick will be very slim once I’m vaccinated. As far as I’m concerned, once I’m good to go you can choose not to get vaccinated, I won’t care.
I think the whole idea of a vaccine passport is silly and I don’t see the utility in developing them now when mass vaccination is rapidly coming online. Perhaps if this idea was implemented back in December or January when the COVID vaccine was scarce and access was restricted a vaccine passport would have some value but now? The US has blown past Biden’s initial benchmark of 1M vaccinations a day in the first 100 days of his presidency, averaging anywhere from 2M to a whopping 4M vaccines administered a day. Mass vaccination rollout has been such a success that the Biden administration has moved the deadline for all states to open vaccination to adults from May 1st to April 19th. Under these circumstances, developing vaccine passports seems a waste of time and money.
While I remain optimistic that few states will be interested, I know many people are concerned about the possibility of vaccine passports so I will give my thoughts on how vaccine passports would play out in the US.
On the federal level, the Biden administration has said the government will not be creating a vaccine passport nor will the use of one be mandated at the federal level. While the administration cites privacy concerns and the desire to not create a disparity between those who have been vaccinated and those who have not, I highly doubt the federal government could legally carry out such a program even if it wanted to. Much in the same way the federal government couldn’t issue a nationwide mask mandate, it can’t issue a nationwide vaccine passport mandate.
That means that, like most COVID-related restrictions, the creation and usage of vaccine passports will be handled on the state level. States have varied wildly on COVID restrictions but vaccine passports come with a new wrinkle; unlike with issuing COVID restrictions, the creation of a vaccine passport will mean any state choosing to create one will have to spend money to do so. If the population of a state is generally against the idea of a vaccine passport, does a governor or state legislature risk the awful optics of spending taxpayer money to create one? Once that decision is made comes an even more controversial one -- choosing whether to make the usage of the vaccine passport mandatory. I’m not sure if such a mandate would be legal, but I am fairly confident it would be political suicide. Even among those who support the existence of vaccine passports, there is little support for making the use of them mandatory. The backlash to a vaccine passport mandate would make the backlash to mask mandates look tame in comparison, I don’t know how many states would have the stomach for it.
Presuming a state does invest in creating a vaccine passport and does not make the use of it mandatory, then that decision gets passed down to county and city governments. This is where things start getting complicated; if one city or county makes vaccine passports mandatory but the next one over does not, that will become very confusing for residents. I’ll use Georgia as an example because, well, I live here -- the metro Atlanta area spans across 9 separate counties. If, for example, 5 of the 9 metro Atlanta counties adopt mandatory vaccine passports and the remaining 4 don't, the confusion over who will need what to go where would be massive. Most Atlanta residents travel across county lines on a daily basis, it would be ridiculous to expect any of them to keep up. I imagine most local governments would realize the confusion adopting different vaccine passport mandates would cause and instead opt into the statewide standard instead.
Now we get down to where the decision on vaccine passports should be made, the businesses that will have to decide if adopting mandatory vaccine passports is in their best interest. I have no issue with any business making that decision for whatever reason it chooses, the same way I support individual businesses having mask-wearing and/or temperature check requirements for entry and putting social distancing measures in place. Their house, their rules, if I don’t want to participate I can leave. I question how many businesses, especially small to mid-sized businesses, are going to want to mandate vaccine passports though. COVID fatigue isn’t just for individuals -- businesses have been jumping through hoops to stay open safely for almost a year now, I have my doubts as to how many will be willing to spend the time and money to implement yet another COVID safety protocol versus keeping their current protocols in place until we reach herd immunity.
My stance on this is that no level of government should be mandating or banning the use of vaccine passports. If a state chooses to develop one for its residents that is their choice, although I think it is a pointless waste of time and money that could be better used to expand access to COVID vaccines for those who want it. If third-party providers want to develop apps that function as vaccine passports, they’re free to do so and businesses should be free to require them as they see fit. If vaccine passports are to happen at all, they need to be voluntary, and the decision to use them be made on as granular a level as possible.