Vaccine Passports

As COVID-19 vaccination rates increase in some countries, there’s talk of a vaccine passport: a certificate that you’ve been vaccinated, which then allows you access to certain activities (travel, work, gym, school etc). Others argue against it pointing out that fraud apart, the vaccines have never been rigorously tested: how long are they effective? What if the passport gives a false sense of well-being, thereby causing caution to be thrown to the wind?

 

The vaccine passport should logically be a digital app. Ironically, I find that it’s the West that doesn’t have a solution to solve the question of unifying (1) Who you are, (2) Have you been vaccinated?, (3) Is this your phone?. Amusingly, this is an area where India and China are better placed, thanks mainly to the fact that they started building their systems in the Internet/smartphone age (think Aadhar) whereas Western systems are pre-Internet/pre-smartphone era relics!

 

Then again, there’s Israel, a hi-tec country that’s so far ahead of everyone else on the vaccination front. And yet Israel issues paper-based vaccine passports. Can one really imagine every 3rd world country issuing digital passports? And if that happens, aren’t paper documents the easiest to forge?

 

Cross international borders, and it gets very problematic. Would countries trust other countries’ records on vaccination status? Which vaccines would be deemed acceptable? Would we see tit for tat policies – if the US only recognizes American vaccines, would China only accept those vaccinated with the Chinese vaccine?

 

On a related note, India has been giving vaccines to Bangladesh because hey, we share a porous border. So it’s in our self-interest if Bangladesh is vaccinated. The US, on the other hand, hasn’t acted the same with their Bangladesh equivalent – Mexico. Guess which vaccine the Mexicans have been using? China’s. Will the US then be forced to accept Mexicans who used the Chinese vaccine? And if they do that, can they really say the Chinese vaccine isn’t good enough? The British vaccine hasn’t been approved in the US yet, but it’s being used in 70 countries. It is almost inevitable that the British vaccine will dominate the world, because the world’s largest manufacturer is India, and India makes the British vaccine. Can any country then refuse to recognize those vaccinated with the British vaccine as not being “good enough”, if that’s what most of the world uses?

 

All of which is why I feel vaccine passports may stay limited to within countries, but have little use across countries. Or maybe they will have use in cross-country travel for optical reasons: a tourist dependent country (Italy, Maldives, Mauritius etc) may find it helpful to claim they’ve vetted those travelling, thereby making others more willing to visit.

 

I’ll end on an unsatisfactory note: it’s hard to say what’ll happen with the whole passport vaccine idea…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more