I'LL GIVE YOU TEN REASONS

As I’ve said all pandemic, I’m in support of very strict, even unpleasant, public health measures for combating COVID. But such measures need to be coherent and map to the evidence and what we believe we know about the virus, the current state of the pandemic, and human behaviour. And, though it's appreciated, I think we're getting way ahead of ourselves with talk about possible privacy or social justice concerns associated with a vaccine passport.

What would, or even could, a provincial vaccine passport do for us, exactly? As far as I’m able to gather, we know that:

1. BC has one of the highest and most rapid vaccination rates in the world so additional persuasion seems unwarranted

2. Passports will never be more compelling to the vaccine hesitant than “guaranteed to significantly reduce the suffering associated with what may be the worst illness of your life”

3. There’s little possibility of increasing the number of vaccinated among the vulnerable (over 60s and the compromised are already greater than 90% vaccinated while making up the overwhelming majority of hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths)

4. We aren’t vaccinating kids who make up a very significant proportion of the population and also appear to drive spread as asymptomatic carriers

5. We have an example from Utrecht, just last week, where proof of vaccination or a recent negative test were entrance requirements for a "COVID-free" outdoor event which – despite these measures, very high vaccination rates among the broader population, and low circulation of the virus – still resulted in becoming the Netherlands' worst super-spreader incident

6. These vaccines, designed for the original virus, were not intended and are not able to prevent infection or transmission; and, as such, a passport only provides a false and dangerous sense of security

7. Even if we achieved a 100% vaccination rate across the country, the consensus among vaccine producers and epidemiologists is that we cannot achieve herd immunity against the Delta variant (or, presumably, any variants that come after it)

8. Despite our novel vaccine technology, which we celebrated as allowing us to press out something new in just a week as needed, we still don’t have a Delta vaccine even many months after it becoming globally dominant

9. Had we a Delta vaccine, no vaccination campaign could ever be rapid or pervasive enough to get sufficiently ahead of this thing by any known method (as a result of the variants already present and the more aggressive ones we actively brew, given the continuous and pervasive saturation of this virus in every populated region of the world)

10. Relying on independent operators to verify passports, as we must in places like pubs and theatres, means the system will never be used as intended, guaranteed

    
    

The above is the best of our knowledge from what I can find. And no part of this is hidden in some obscure journal of virology or intergovernmental report. Every bit of the above is widely known and has been publicly stated by many of our favourite governments and health authorities around the world and throughout the pandemic. So, what am I missing that blows all of this out of the water, making vaccine passports not just a valuable but essential part of ending this pandemic?

All I’ve seen to date in defence of passports are vague and, to be honest, ridiculous analogies to personal vaccination records and Yellow Fever certificates or maybe a driver’s licence or library card. And most of this, what to me reads as incoherent, comes from people who should know better. But, as demonstrated throughout this pandemic and ad nauseam, no rational defence, clarification, or correction is ever required on any point at any time. These are unprecedented times and journalists are not allowed to ask serious questions even about obscene policy or sudden and unexplained reversals of policy. For example, fully vaccinated public health officials have blocked fully vaccinated reporters, masked or otherwise, from attending their briefest of briefings. They've done so on the grounds that in-person is unnecessary and unsafe; all while these very folks send unvaccinated teachers and students back to school to mingle in much larger numbers, in far more confined spaces, and for periods of time far longer than they would ever be comfortable with. It’s like when, regardless of context or nuance, public health encourages folks to pack into the close confines of public transit for two hours, with windows firmly shut and everyone in any old face covering; this, while having deemed the sipping of an espresso on a vacant outdoor patio on an empty street and for under nine minutes to be a public safety violation and the work of a filthy anti-social troglodyte with no regard for others and seeking only to rebel against a just and sensible public health regime. At this point, “Look, we make the rules!” (facimus praecepta) may as well be an official slogan.

Sadly, all of this incoherence and lack of basic communication transcends government. Instead, so many mandates come across as little more than a class of administrators publicly declaring they are “doing more” without any apparent care for whether they are making the situation better or worse. These interventions are often at best little more than self-validation, just as we have seen in so many workplaces. This is like when your university or office demands you come to work – not because they’ve taken all reasonable measures to prevent transmission of an airborne pandemic virus, or because it hasn’t been shown over many months that the entire staff gets far more done from home and, as it turns out, nobody has a preference for sitting in traffic for ten hours a week – because boss or HR have some backward notion of maintaining a “positive workplace environment.” They gladly manipulate their staff in this way only because they are able, all while those impacted get to watch as their superiors actively kill any present or future sense of a positive workplace environment. It’s kinda what we do.

For my own amusement, I’ve been collecting and writing about acts of stupidity just like this for decades now and so I’m certain these measures were ubiquitous and unrelenting prior to the pandemic. And I’m also certain these pandemic policies come from the same systems, institutions, all guided by the same administrative thinking that helps pass bylaws prohibiting smoking or idling, for example, doing so in defence of public health and on the determination that these measures are certain to save lives – only to never enforce any of it anywhere at any time and, in fact, declare all of the above unenforceable. These are the same people who enthusiastically spend $9M building cycling ‘infrastructure’ that does not and could not ever possibly protect cyclists (or motorists), as in the painting of lines on the road, all because it allows them to declare they’ve "doubled the region’s cycling infrastructure." They do this in preference to spending just a fraction of that on infrastructure that can and will protect road users. These are the same brilliant political, legal, and public policy wonks who deem parking and speeding tickets to be the same deterrent and punishment for someone earning $325k as a person working part time on minimum wage. These are the same ‘data-oriented’ folk who okay the widening of roads to alleviate congestion, when five decades of evidence (both local and from every corner of the globe) tells us this will only make the problem worse. These are the folks who defend stationing undercover cops all over the city to ticket jaywalkers crossing the street safely in the absence of any automobiles, and issuing these law violators outrageous fines, but see pedestrians mowed down in crosswalks as unavoidable “accidents.” They feel that housing for a renter (with no income or assets of any kind) should have far less protections than the monthly income on one of twelve real estate investments for someone with $25M in assets. These are the same people who require all new cafes and restaurants to have a washroom large enough to accommodate a wheelchair but not that the building it is housed in be wheelchair accessible (or that the “accessibility ramp” they just installed not terminate at a three-inch-high door sill) …I could go on like this all day.

It is from these same minds running this same administrative logic that we now receive the essential ‘more’ that is the vaccine passport. At the very least, we can be certain these passports won’t apply to the people mandating them (the same way travel and gathering restrictions never have.) That’s a real problem. And then paired with that we know they will never, at minimum, require the passport system to demonstrate its worth as a public health tool, only as one item on a list of measures continually offered as evidence of their superhuman effort to do everything imaginable. To add to that certainty we can also anticipate that none of this will be coordinated or take into account any nuance (like the difference between vaccines, vaccine regimens, prior infection status, new variants, and on) and that every region will have different requirements, making it all still more pointless.

There may be all kinds of good reasons for these passports, but what are they? What is even one compelling reason?