Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician, and a professor at
Harvard Medical School. and Jay Bhattacharya, a physician,
economist, and a professor at Stanford Medical School, write in The Wall Street Journal:
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 idea is simple: Once you’ve received your shots, you get a document or phone app, which you flash to gain entry to previously locked-down venues—restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, offices, schools.
It sounds like a way of easing coercive lockdown restrictions, but it’s the
opposite. To see why, consider dining. Restaurants in most parts of the U.S.
have already reopened, at limited capacity in some places. A vaccine passport
would prohibit entry by potential customers who haven’t
received their shots. It would restrict the freedom even of those who have: If
you’re vaccinated but your spouse isn’t, forget about dining out as a couple.
Planes
and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would
suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated. The only places where restrictions
would be relatively eased would be those still fully locked down, such as many
live-event venues and schools. Yet even there, the passport idea depends on
keeping the underlying restrictions in place—giving officials an incentive to
do so for much longer as leverage to overcome vaccine resistance.
The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination. Such measures can be legitimate: Many schools require immunization against common childhood illnesses, and visitors to some African countries must be vaccinated against yellow fever. But Covid vaccine passports would harm, not benefit, public health.
The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as
the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk
people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve
been infected are already immune. The young are at low risk, and children—for
whom no vaccine has been approved anyway—are at far less risk of death than
from the flu.
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