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…

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