VACCINE PASSPORTS ARE A NORMAL, justifiable, and proportionate response to the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Or so we are told. The passports are no different from other mandated health and safety requirements, such as seat belts or laws that prevent people from smoking on airplanes. Or so we are told. They merely represent upgraded digitized versions of paper vaccine certificates that have been around for a long time. Or so we are told.
None of these claims are true, but they give the comforting impression that nothing much will change as the passports are rolled out and come into effect. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.
But the biggest lie of all is that vaccine passports are a small, collective sacrifice that will allow us to return to normality. By “nudging” almost everyone who can get vaccinated to do so, the passports will supposedly help us finally achieve herd immunity and thereby eliminate the virus. And once everyone is vaccinated and poses no contagion risk, we will safely be able to resume normal activities. This line of reasoning is exemplified in an article published by the Australian website The Conversation, titled “Vaccine Passports: Why They Are Good for Society”: “[V]accine passports are a minimal cost for returning to normal daily life and for reducing anxiety for those you come into contact with on airplanes or in theatres, restaurants, or public stadiums. They are a small sacrifice for a greater good.”1
This logic is simple but dangerously flawed.
Appealing to the greater good can be an effective—and sometimes necessary—means of securing approval for public measures that involve some degree of individual or collective sacrifice. Few people want to be seen as outliers, especially if it means feeling responsible or being blamed for the suffering and deaths of others.
But there is a fundamental flaw in applying the “greater good” argument to vaccine passports, because the passports themselves—unlike the vaccine certificates of old—offer precious little in the way of potential good and a huge amount in the way of potential harm.
The practice of requiring proof of immunization to access certain spaces or traverse certain borders dates back more than 200 years to Edward Jenner’s creation of the smallpox vaccine in 1796. Smallpox had been a major scourge throughout the eighteenth century, killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five reigning European monarchs. Around 30 percent—almost one in three—of the people infected with smallpox died from the disease. After Jenner’s development of the vaccine, more and more jurisdictions began requesting that travelers present proof of inoculation. The policy was implemented more widely across the globe as international travel grew in the nineteenth century.
This trend intensified after the introduction of air travel in the twentieth century, says Sanjoy Bhattacharya, professor of history at the University of York. Vaccine certification checks were enforced before travel “with forcible isolation at airports of any passengers considered to have dubious documentation.”2 The International Health Regulations (IHR), adopted in 1969, allowed signatory states to demand proof of vaccination as a condition of entry. Today the only disease specified in the IHR is yellow fever, although the World Health Organization (WHO) has urged certain high-risk countries to propose vaccination certificates for diseases that are still prevalent within their borders and to which their population has not been sufficiently inoculated.
The implementation—and imposition—of vaccine passports for COVID-19 is supposed to represent a mere continuation of this long-standing practice. In reality, it represents a sharp deviation. Digital vaccine passports are poles apart from the paper vaccine certificates that have been used over the past two centuries for endemic viruses such as smallpox, polio, and yellow fever. Whereas vaccine certificates have been specifically used to establish vaccine status at certain national borders, today’s vaccine passports will have a far broader scope of application. They can be—and in some cases already are—required to travel within one’s own country of residence, as well as access basic services or even make a living.
The dichotomy could not be starker. In the first case, failure to provide proof of vaccination meant you could not visit a particular country where vaccination is required. This represented a limited infringement of personal liberty. In the second, failure to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination could lead to ostracism from society and the total loss of one’s basic rights and freedoms.
The stakes could not be higher. If you do not have a vaccine passport, you will be prevented from accessing basic services, from earning a living, or traveling within your own country. Even if you do have one, you will be exposed to unprecedented levels of government and corporate surveillance, data mining, and behavioral control. You will no longer have a say over what goes inside your body. Just about everything you do, from boarding a plane, to enrolling your child in a school, to entering a supermarket, will require the consent of government agencies. And that consent can be withdrawn at any moment. Put simply, this is not a return to normality; it is the creation of a starkly different form of existence in which most of us will have virtually no agency over our own lives.
Of course, the new vaccines themselves are very different from the vaccines of old. Vaccines have traditionally taken between 5 and 10 years to develop and fully test. The current crop of COVID-19 vaccines, based on novel technologies, were developed, tested, and rolled out in less than a year. It was a remarkable scientific achievement, but the results have not lived up to expectations. Unlike traditional vaccines, they do not use a killed or attenuated form of the disease to trigger an immune reaction but instead employ a genetic intervention more accurately described as “gene therapy.” The immune response they stimulate is much more narrowly focused than that of traditional vaccines and thus easier for the virus to evade.
What’s more, the attendant health risks of the COVID-19 vaccines, particularly over the long term, are still not fully understood, as the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation noted in its recommendation not to jab 12- to 15-year-olds—a recommendation the UK government ignored.3 Many of the scientific studies used to justify granting the vaccines “emergency use authorization” still haven’t been released to the public or even made available to scientists or doctors. According to the WHO, just 12 percent of 86 clinical trials for 20 COVID-19 vaccines have been made publicly available.4
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in November 2021 responded to a freedom of information act (FOIA) request to hand over all of its records pertaining to the COVID-19 vaccines—totaling some 330,000 pages—by proposing to release just 500 pages per month on a rolling basis. In other words, the US public—and by extension, the global public—will not know what the FDA currently knows about the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines until 2097, by which point many of us will already have died. Even the Reuters news agency, whose CEO sits on the board of vaccine maker Pfizer, seemed shocked by the move, publishing a report titled “Wait What? FDA Wants 55 Years to Process FOIA Request over Vaccine Data.”5 In early January, a federal judge in Texas ordered the FDA to release all the data in eight months at a rate of over 55,000 pages a month. As Reuters reported, “that’s roughly 75 years and four months faster than the FDA said it could take to complete the Freedom of Information Act request.”6
Most significantly, traditional vaccines prevent infection and transmission. The COVID-19 vaccines do not.7 A traveler required to take, say, a yellow fever vaccine can rest assured that the vaccine is not only extremely safe but will also provide near-total protection from catching the virus—not only for the duration of the visit but for many years after. And host country authorities can also be confident that the traveler will not become a vector of contagion during his or her journey.
The same cannot be said of the COVID-19 vaccines. They do not confer strong, lasting immunity from infection or transmission of the virus. As even the CDC admitted, both vaccinated and unvaccinated infected people are infectious to others. A CDC study leaked to the New York Times showed that viral loads are similar for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.8 In addition, whatever protection against transmission and infection the vaccines do offer against the Delta variant wanes quickly. Against Omicron, the protection is even weaker and shorter lasting.
By mid-2021 hopes were still high that if enough people were vaccinated, countries would achieve herd immunity. This is despite the fact that the vaccines never promised to offer sterilizing immunity, in which the immunity is so complete that the virus can’t gain a foothold in a vaccinated individual. But that didn’t stop public health authorities and other government agencies from propagating the idea. In May 2021, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said the more people who get vaccinated, the more we approach eliminating the virus instead of merely controlling it. “And that’s the reason why we continue to push to get those people who are reluctant to get vaccinated, to, in fact, get vaccinated.”
But then the Delta variant arrived and upended expectations. By July 2021, COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions, and deaths were soaring across the United States. Vaccine advocates were quick to blame the new wave of infections on the populace’s failure to hit the government’s benchmarks. The Biden administration even called the summer outbreak a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and admonished the vaccine-hesitant with language such as “we’ve been patient but our patience is wearing thin,” a grave mistake for at least two reasons: First, it stigmatized the unvaccinated, further aggravating tensions in an already divided country; and second, it offered people who were vaccinated a false sense of security that they were protected from infection.9
Beyond US shores, in countries where health authorities were tracking breakthrough cases more closely, the evidence against vaccine efficacy was stacking up. Data emerging from Israel, which injected most of its population in January and February of 2021 with the Pfizer vaccines, was showing by June that not only were the vaccines exceptionally leaky against the Delta variant, but the limited protection they did confer waned after only a few months. Another study by Oxford University and reported in the Financial Times found that “the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine against symptomatic infection almost halved after four months, and that vaccinated people infected with the more infectious Delta variant had as high viral loads as the unvaccinated.”10
This, together with Delta’s extreme infectiousness and ability to evade the vaccine’s defenses, explains why some of the world’s most vaccinated countries, from Iceland to the UK to Singapore, as well as some of the most vaccinated states in the United States, including Vermont, Hawaii, and Oregon, suffered far worse summer outbreaks in 2021 than they had in 2020.
In the UK, 84 percent of people over the age of 12 had received at least one dose and 75 percent had received both as of September 1, 2021.11 Yet the number of hospitalized patients and patients on ventilators between early June and early September increased roughly ninefold.12 By mid-September more fully vaccinated people over the age of 40 were catching the virus than the unvaccinated cohort, according to the government’s own figures.13
On December 8, 2021, the UK government reported that between weeks 45 and 48 of that year—roughly equating to the month of November—fully vaccinated people accounted for 47 percent of the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country (compared to 39 percent for unvaccinated) and 56 percent of COVID-19-related hospital admissions (compared to 39 percent for unvaccinated). If you include people who had received just one dose of a vaccine, the vaccinated cohort accounted for 55 percent of recorded cases during the period and 60 percent of hospital admissions.
It was a similar story in Israel, which saw a 700-fold increase in cases in the space of two and a half months during 2021. At the beginning of June, the country was recording approximately 15 cases a day. Most people were vaccinated and the pandemic was considered as good as over. A month later, by July 1, the number of daily cases had shot up to 290. A month and a half after that, in mid-September, the number of daily cases had reached 11,000. Largely vaccinated Israel was recording over 2,000 more cases than at any other time during the pandemic. By mid-August most hospitalized people were vaccinated; as Science Magazine reported:
As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older. ‘There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated,’ says Uri Shalit, a bioinformatician at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) who has consulted on COVID-19 for the government. One of the big stories from Israel [is]: ‘Vaccines work, but not well enough.’14
By this point, it was clear that so-called “breakthrough cases” were not as rare as their name suggests. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines do not prevent COVID-19 infection, nor do they stop the vaccinated person from transmitting the infection, although she emphasized that the vaccine still provides strong protection against hospitalization or death.15
In September 2021, S. V. Subramanian, a Harvard professor of population health and geography, published a paper in the European Journal of Epidemiology that found that “increases in COVID-19 were unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2,947 US counties.” Subramanian concluded his paper by asserting that although vaccines significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, the “sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined … other pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions may need to be put in place alongside increasing vaccination.”16
In the UK, Sir Andrew Pollard, the director of Oxford Vaccine Group, cautioned that, since the emergence of the Delta variant, “herd immunity is not a possibility” with the current crop of vaccines, as the virus “still infects vaccinated individuals.”
He added, “And I suspect that what the virus throws up next is a variant that is perhaps even better at transmitting within vaccinated populations.”17 Which is exactly what happened.
In October 2021, a highly contagious COVID-19 variant with unusually high numbers of mutations on the spike protein gained a foothold in South Africa. Thanks to those mutations, it almost completely evaded the current crop of vaccines. According to preliminary analyses, the Pfizer vaccine provided just 33 percent protection against infection, compared to 80 percent protection before the new variant’s emergence.18 The Moderna vaccine fared little better. Other vaccines offer even less protection against infection and transmission of the new variant, reported the New York Times on December 19.19
Dubbed Omicron, the variant spread like wildfire across the globe. By the beginning of 2022, it was the dominant variant in many countries and super spreader events involving largely vaccinated people were taking place all over the world. Many countries in Europe, the world’s most vaccinated continent, were registering record levels of cases and some countries, including Denmark, Greece, and Italy, were reimposing testing requirements for all travelers, including EU nationals, regardless of their vaccination status. Israel, the most “boostered” country on planet Earth, was in the grip of its fifth wave of infections.
All of which begs the question: If a vaccinated person still has a marked propensity to carry, shed, and transmit the virus, particularly in its Delta or Omicron variant forms, what difference does a vaccination passport, certificate, or ID make in preventing spread of the virus?
As conditions have changed, so, too, has the narrative around the vaccines. Now, the focus is squarely on the protection they confer against hospitalization and death. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the policy response of public health agencies. Governments around the world are still plowing ahead with plans to impose vaccine passports and mandates on their respective populations. In countries such as the United States and Australia, senior policymakers, including US President Joe Biden, continued to blame the unvaccinated for the spread of the virus. In the fall of 2021, Dr. Fauci insisted that “many, many more mandates” will be needed to bring the pandemic under control.20
Dr. Fauci argued that everyone should be prepared (or if necessary compelled) to “give up their individual right of making” their “own decision for the greater good of society”:
[A]s a member of society reaping all the benefits of being a member of society, you have a responsibility to society. And I think each of us, particularly in the context of a pandemic that’s killing millions of people, you have got to look at it and say, there comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right. Of making your own decision for the greater good of society. There’s no doubt that that’s the case.21
Dr Fauci said these words in late October 2021, by which time it was clear the Delta variant was evading the vaccines with disconcerting ease. Multiple studies from countries such as Vietnam, the UK, and the United States had shown that infected vaccinated people were carrying very similar levels of virus in their upper respiratory tracts as infected unvaccinated people. Then came the hyper-contagious Omicron variant, which has proven to be even more adept at evading not only the vaccines but also infection-acquired immunity.
“A number of studies are converging on the fact that 2 doses of vaccination has poor vaccine effectiveness against Omicron,” wrote US hematologist-oncologist and health researcher Vinay Prasad on January 9 in his blogpost “Vaccine Effectiveness (Against Infection Not Severe Disease) Goes Down the Drain.” Prasad added that while three doses fare slightly better, “the effect will rapidly wane as antibody titers fall, and infection is certain as the number of exposures increase.”22
By early January 2022—just over a year after the vaccine rollouts began—many of the world’s most vaccinated countries were registering record numbers of cases. In heavily vaccinated Italy, Spain, and Portugal the infection curve was so high that it dwarfed all previous waves. All eyes were on Israel, the first country to mandate booster shots for its population. On January 12, the number of new daily infections hit 41,154, shattering all previous records.
Clearly, Fauci’s claim that each individual has a responsibility to be vaccinated to limit spread of the virus to others does not pass master in the Omicron era. The decision to be vaccinated has become almost entirely personal, says Prasad:
This is not an argument about the benefits of vaccination for the individual—vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; instead, this is an argument about the effects of vaccination on symptomatic disease and (some good portion of) transmission. Conclusion: you cannot contain the viral spread of omicron by boosting.23
What’s more, it is by now more or less clear that immunity from previous infection provides broader and longer-lasting protection against the virus than vaccine-induced immunity. This is not to say that people should intentionally infect themselves (and risk suffering severe symptoms) or that public health authorities should seek to achieve herd immunity but rather that public health policy should at least recognize that natural immunity confers superior protection against future infection. In August 2021 a real-world observational study conducted in Israel examined the medical records of tens of thousands of Israelis, tracking their infections, symptoms, and hospitalizations between June 1 and August 14.24 What the study found was that never-infected people who were vaccinated in January and February were 6 to 13 times more likely to get infected four to six months down the line than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with the coronavirus.
Many other studies have since confirmed this trend, though there has been one key outlier. A CDC study based on data on 7,000 people across nine states and 187 hospitals claims that people hospitalized with “coronavirus-like” symptoms (a term that should already set off alarm bells) are over five times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 if they had had recent prior infection than if they were recently vaccinated.
Besides the use of the ambiguous term “COVID-like symptoms,” there are other reasons to question the validity of the trial. First, the CDC has an explicit policy of pressuring people who have already had a COVID-19 infection to get vaccinated as quickly as possible. Indeed, the conclusion of the study was that “eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.”25 In the EU, by contrast, people who can prove they have had an infection are considered immune, albeit only for six months. Swiss authorities recently bumped up the period of presumed immunity as a result of natural infection from six months to a year.26
Second, the CDC has done a poor job of tracking breakthrough cases since the vaccine rollouts began, while authorities in Israel and the UK have tracked them meticulously. There is even evidence to suggest that the CDC has been manipulating its vaccination data. As Kaiser Health News reported in December 2021, for over a month the CDC had been reporting that 99.9 percent of everyone over the age of 65 had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine:
That would be remarkable—if true.
But health experts and state officials say it’s certainly not.
They note that the CDC as of Dec. 5 has recorded more seniors at least partly vaccinated—55.4 million—than there are people in that age group—54.1 million, according to the latest census data from 2019. The CDC’s vaccination rate for residents 65 and older is also significantly higher than the 89% vaccination rate found in a poll conducted in November by KFF [Kaiser Family Foundation].
Similarly, a YouGov poll, conducted last month for The Economist, found 83% of people 65 and up said they had received at least an initial dose of vaccine.
And the CDC counts 21 states as having almost all their senior residents at least partly vaccinated (99.9 percent). But several of those states show much lower figures in their vaccine databases, including California, with 86 percent inoculated, and West Virginia, with nearly 90 percent as of December 6.27 Another CDC study, published in August, suggested that people who have been vaccinated are 11 times less likely to die of COVID-19 than people who haven’t. Again, this has raised the pressure on people to get vaccinated. Yet the results also clash with data coming out of other countries. For example, in the UK, where breakthrough cases have been tracked extremely closely, 75 percent of the patients who died “of” or “with” COVID-19 between weeks 45 and 48 of 2021 had received both shots of one of the vaccines while 21 percent were unvaccinated. Given that just over 80 percent of the UK’s population had received both doses of the vaccine by late November, vaccination clearly offers some degree of protection against death from COVID-19 but not nearly as much as the CDC study claims.
For its part, the UK government was at pains to underscore that the data does not in any way undermine the purported efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines at protecting people from hospitalization or death:
In the context of very high vaccine coverage in the population, even with a highly effective vaccine, it is expected that a large proportion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths would occur in vaccinated individuals, simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective.28
While that is correct, as is the fact that the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 have fallen significantly between March 2021 and January 2022, even as case numbers have surged to a new record, it is also undeniable that the COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be much less effective at containing disease transmission than other vaccines. In October 2021 even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), conceded that with the current crop of vaccines, it is “going to be very difficult, at least in the foreseeable future and maybe ever, to truly eliminate this highly transmissible virus.”
By now it is clear that vaccinated and unvaccinated people infected with COVID-19 have similar viral loads, that fully vaccinated individuals can catch SARS-CoV-2 as well as spread it to others, sometimes even leading to severe and fatal COVID-19, including among other fully vaccinated individuals.
This is confirmed by a growing body of real-world cases of mass infection among the vaccinated. They included the Boardmasters Festival in the UK in August 2021. To attend the event, music, surfing, and skateboard fans had to provide their NHS Pass, proving a recent negative test, full vaccination, or COVID-19 infection in the past 180 days (the same conditions required by the EU’s Green Pass). Yet a week after the event, almost 5,000 COVID-19 cases—approximately 10 percent of all attendees—had been linked to the event.29 Newquay, the city where it was held, briefly became England’s “COVID capital,” registering nearly four times the average rate of infection in the country.
The event organizers did everything by the book, yet the result was still a massive spike in infections. Something similar happened at Harvard Business School, which was forced to move its first-year and some second-year MBA students to remote learning after reporting an outbreak of sixty COVID-19 cases within a few weeks of reopening for the fall semester. This despite the fact that 95 percent of students and 96 percent of faculty had been vaccinated against COVID-19.30
In July of 2021, two residents of a small, rural South Dakota nursing home died of COVID-19 and others fell ill, even though 100 percent of the care home’s elderly residents were fully vaccinated. “The outbreak in the Good Samaritan Society–Deuel County senior care facility in Clear Lake, South Dakota, mirrors a rise in vaccine breakthroughs in nursing homes across the nation,” reported the local newspaper Grand Forks Herald.31
During the same month around 100 cases of COVID-19 were reported on board the Royal Navy’s flagship, HMS Queen Elizabeth. Several other warships in the fleet accompanying it were also affected, reported the BBC. According to the UK’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, all crew on the deployment had received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.32
In the Spanish city of Malaga, 68 nurses and medics working in the intensive care unit at a hospital tested positive for COVID-19 in early December after attending a Christmas party. All of them had had the third booster jab or antigen tests before attending the party, according to Spanish health authorities.
In Lithuania, the first EU member to enforce a society-wide COVID Pass, cases soared so dramatically following implementation that hospitals were forced to turn away nonurgent patients.33 It is a similar story across the EU. By late November 2021, five months after the introduction of the Green Pass, Europe was once again the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the two months after Rome took the drastic step in mid-October of banning all unvaccinated Italians from working within the formal economy, the number of daily cases surged around fivefold. In France, one of the first countries to ban people without the vaccine passport from accessing all hospitality venues, case numbers were once again setting a record high by mid-November.
These fast-multiplying real-world cases should be enough to bring vaccine passport rollouts to a grinding halt, or at the very least slow them down. Not only do these measures fail to prevent or even dramatically reduce the spread of the virus; they may, as evidenced in Lithuania, worsen public health outcomes. Yet governments around the world continue to intensify their efforts to force vaccine passports onto their populations. That makes no sense, at least not from a public health perspective.
If vaccine passports don’t improve public health, why are the governments of the world’s most advanced economies going to such lengths to roll them out?
Because vaccine passports offer an unprecedented degree of control over a population. The powerful digital tech platforms offer a highly efficient means to identify, locate, segregate, coerce, and punish those who refuse to submit by stripping them of their jobs, banning them from school, barring them from travel (even within their own country), and even denying them medical treatment or access to food.
But it’s not just about control; it’s also about money. Large companies in the tech, financial, and pharmaceutical industries stand to reap huge dividends from the new economy taking shape around us. The COVID vaccines have already spawned nine new billionaires in the pharmaceutical industry. There will no doubt be more. Pfizer expected to sell $33-billion-worth of its COVID-19 vaccine in 2021.34 That would make it the second-highest revenue-generating drug ever. Thanks to its vaccine, Spikevax, Moderna turned its first ever quarterly profit in 2021.35 In a sick irony, the quicker the effects of the vaccines wear off, the more money the companies stand to earn, as booster jabs open up the possibility of recurring business income. Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports will help the companies to maximize that income.
All this is playing out in plain sight, before our eyes. Consider this: Among those losing their jobs for refusing the jab are many doctors, nurses, and health care workers who saved thousands of lives and were hailed as heroes during the first waves of the pandemic. Not only is this a poor way to thank them; it denies the possibility that they may be better positioned than almost anyone to assess the risks and benefits of a new medical procedure. In the UK, 111,000 of the National Health Service’s 1.32 million workers were still unvaccinated and yet to receive a single dose as of early October, despite a looming vaccine mandate.36
Many proponents of vaccine passports and mandates cite as precedent the 1905 Supreme Court case of Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, in which the court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws, in that case for smallpox. But there are three important differences between Jacobson vs. Massachusetts and the mandates and vaccine passports being rolled out for COVID-19. First, the average case fatality rate for acute smallpox infections was a staggering 30 percent; for COVID-19 it’s between 1 percent and 2 percent for the general population and lower for people who don’t have specific comorbidities. Second, the smallpox vaccine had a 100-year track record; at the time of the Supreme Court’s ruling, there was already a great deal of information available about its short- and long-term safety and efficacy, which helped to ensure it enjoyed broad social acceptance. The same cannot be said of the COVID-19 vaccines. Last, and most important, the penalty for noncompliance, which Jacobson was contesting, was a $5 fine. Today, that would be about $155. Jacobson was not threatened with the loss of employment or livelihood. Nor was he threatened with the loss of freedom of movement or the ability to take part in society.
The current vaccine passports and mandates do not represent a proportionate, ethical, or effective response to the threat posed by COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore cannot be justified.
In the UK, almost 2,000 Christian leaders signed a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson warning about the existential threat posed by vaccine passports to the country’s liberal democracy:
We risk creating a two-tier society, a medical apartheid in which an underclass of people who decline vaccination are excluded from significant areas of public life. There is also a legitimate fear that this scheme would be the thin end of the wedge leading to a permanent state of affairs in which COVID vaccine status could be expanded to encompass other forms of medical treatment and perhaps even other criteria beyond that. This scheme has the potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it and to create a surveillance state in which the government uses technology to control certain aspects of citizens’ lives. As such, this constitutes one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics.37
From the very beginning, we were sold a quick-fix solution: Just take two shots of one of the vaccines (or one in the case of Johnson & Johnson’s) and you’ll be safe and protected and life can return to normal. What we actually got was something quite different: a trade-off, with pros and cons of gargantuan proportions. Anyone with even a smidgen of business acumen—or who has ever even bought something off Amazon only to be disappointed by the product upon its arrival—will recognize this kind of bait and switch for what it is: a bad deal.
At some point, the world’s global citizens—including those who are vaccinated—need to ask ourselves what we stand to gain from vaccine passports. As recent experience in Europe has shown, they will do precious little to stop the spread of a disease that many virologists and epidemiologists are now warning will become endemic, anyway. In return, we are being asked to give up just about everything that matters—or at least should matter: our privacy; control over our own bodies; control over our own lives; basic core freedoms, such as the ability to earn a living, to feed our families, to travel within our own countries, to receive an education, to assemble, to sit at a café and have a drink with our friends on an outdoor terrace. Even if you are fully vaccinated—meaning you are fully up to date with all the booster shots—you will still have to submit to unfettered tech-enabled surveillance, tracking, and control in a two-tiered checkpoint society.
Vaccine passports have been sold to the public as a good deal—something that will allow us to return to our lives. But in fact, they are a shockingly bad deal for almost everyone. We do not have a seat at the negotiating table. Nor have we been consulted on the terms and conditions of the deal—a deal that promises to hand over vast new powers to government agencies and create vast new markets and opportunities in the tech, finance, and pharmaceutical sectors, while stripping individuals of our basic rights and freedoms. And as I will cover in chapter 2, it’s a deal that contravenes the most basic national and international human rights laws.