Reject vaccine passports

Around the world this year, governments and bureaucrats have pushed to implement “vaccine passports”. A vaccine passport is a standardized form of proof of vaccination against Covid provided by the government which is intended for use by businesses, employers, schools, or other organizations and institutions to legally discriminate among their customers, employees, students, members, or the general public.

Like lockdown measures, gathering and travel restrictions, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and other pandemic policies which have been decreed by government leaders since March 2020, the vaccine passport system has been marketed as an emergency protection of public health. But any policy must be evaluated not only by the purported virtue of its goals, but also by its costs on society. This lesson should be indisputably clear to anyone aware of the horrors sold by the twentieth-century governments in Russia, Germany, and China to their respective nations under the banner of establishing a utopia-the ultimate societal good. As Milton Friedman puts it: “When you try to use bad means to achieve good objectives, the end result is likely to be that the badness of the means will triumph over the goodness of the objectives.”

So what kind of means is a vaccine passport system? What are the costs of this system?

Firstly, such a system is a dangerous step not just towards authoritarianism, but into authoritarianism. Secondly, it fractures society with segregation and it promotes and facilitates persecution-the soul-deforming practice of hatred. Thirdly, it degrades medical privacy. A vaccine passport system must be rejected wholesale based on its intolerable costs.

Authoritarianism

A vaccine passport system is a destruction of freedom the likes of which have been fortunately unfamiliar to the West. It allows the government to impose penalties on the everyday lives of large swaths of the population based on their personal medical decisions. Not double vaccinated? Forget about gathering with others, dining in a restaurant, seeing a movie in the theatre, working out at a gym, or supervising your child’s swimming lesson. Such a program resembles the “social credit” system the communist government of China uses to coerce compliance and behavioral conformity among its people.

What is the limiting principle for such a program to stop the government from penalizing citizens engaged in other “unhealthy behaviors”? After all, people making poor decisions about their health-physical, mental, and spiritual-is not new. Some people choose to smoke cigarettes. Some eat fatty fast food. Others spend hours on dopamine-driven social media. Still others exercise and sleep less than they should. Should the government be tracking and penalizing these people? Surely, we would call a government that does this ‘authoritarian’. Such a government, though perhaps acting in the name of public health would be doing so at the great expense of the personal freedoms of its people. So is a government which implements a vaccine passport system.

Segregation & persecution

By definition, a vaccine passport program systematically enforces the separation of Covid-unvaccinated people from Covid-vaccinated people. It banishes the former group from normal society-from places of business, public establishments, regular employment, educational campuses, and social events.

At a time when the internal social cohesion of Western nations is under great stress the cost of state-sponsored division is unbearable. The creation of a tiered society-of literal second-class citizens-is the surest way to generate and reinforce resentment and strife.

But even more deleterious than government-enforced separation and ostracization, a vaccine passport system encourages political persecution.

Regardless of one’s own opinion on the Covid vaccines, not many would argue that the issue hasn’t been highly politicized. We should be extremely cautious about enabling real, tangible persecution across a political divide already characterized by rancor.

As David French puts it in his September 2020 article for the Times:

It is clear that partisan Americans dislike each other a great deal. We live separately, snarling at each other across a growing divide. The result is a politics of fear and rage, where policy differences often take a back seat to the list of grievances that red possesses against blue and blue against red.

…our competing sides do not trust that if they lose they will still be free and secure in the land that they love. They fear domination. They do not trust the possibility of accommodation.

Indeed, a vaccine passport tramples on the ideas of accommodation and mutual respect. It is like approaching two children on the school field who are squaring up for a fistfight and handing one a baseball bat.

French continues:

In an atmosphere of increasing negative polarization and geographic separation, we can no longer take our nation for granted. We must intentionally care for the state of our union.

Surely we are deceiving ourselves if we believe that violence or even civil war are not potential risks of snipping one too many threads in our social fabric.

Invading medical privacy

Another cost of a vaccine passport system is the frequent incursions on medical privacy it would require. Forcing patrons to disclose medical status to be allowed entry into ordinary public spaces means relinquishing the time-honored convention of medical privacy.

Until the present, it has been widely recognized that maintaining the privacy of an individual’s health information protects them from being treated unfairly by insurance companies, employers, or other actors who might buy or sell that information without The owner’s consent. A society which forces the frequent and indiscriminate disclosure of medical information can not rightly safeguard the principle of individual consent.

Is it temporary?

Some may think the vaccine passport system is only temporary and it will soon be scrapped if we will just go along with it for a short while. These people will find that it is difficult to comply their way out of tyranny. Our wise friend Milton Friedman also offers this piece of counsel: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” And as long as the populace is willing to grant governments and bureaucrats more power and control in the name of emergencies, the emergencies will never end. They will only mutate and multiply.

Take a stand

I will not show a vaccine passport and acquiesce to tyranny in my nation.

A vaccine passport ushers in authoritarianism with a far-reaching and unethical social penalty system. It is segregationist and promotes hateful persecution. It damages medical privacy.

May we be courageous enough to stand in firm opposition to a vaccine passport system through principled non-participation.

If you think I have overstated it, please read this thread from a man living under a strict vaccine passport regime in Lithuania which illustrates the costs of the system in a terribly personal way. His thread is the most important thing on Twitter in 2021.

Originally published at https://aphorism.substack.com on October 11, 2021.