No. The underclass would face undue stigma, burden
Digital immunity passports for COVID-19 raise troubling moral and legal issues.
We support widespread vaccination against COVID-19, once a vaccine is available. But there are different ways of facilitating vaccination and they are not morally and legally on a par.
Some are proposing that we should be required to register our vaccination status with the government and carry digital passports via a smartphone app to repeatedly verify our immunity status as we go about our lives. This proposal is far more invasive than the vaccination programs that we already have in schools.
Canada aims vigorously to protect people’s privacy rights. Are we now going to require people to submit to government tracking and entrust a panoply of private actors — ranging from Apple and Scotiabank Arena, to bosses and store clerks — with medical information?
Will the application also share information about where we go and what we do with third parties, as apps commonly do? Will the app be designed to give the government this further information?
Perhaps there are ways of avoiding these privacy concerns. But we need concrete proposals for guaranteeing that the passports are not a vehicle for surveillance. And developing such legally enforceable guarantees is no small task, as ongoing legal battles with Facebook and other tech companies illustrate.
Digital immunity passports would also disproportionately burden some of the most marginalized members of society. Will undocumented workers — many of whom build Canada’s homes and grow its food — feel comfortable registering with the government? How will people without smartphones show proof of immunity?
There are less concerning alternatives. We could hand out documents certifying immunity upon vaccination. We could require vaccination only for highexposure jobs, such as front-line health care work. Elsewhere, we could encourage vaccination without making it mandatory. For instance, public health nurses could visit workplaces, shelters, pharmacies and public areas offering free vaccines. This could be done without requiring government registration, and would be less invasive, less coercive, and reach a broader swath of the public. Such alternatives would be cheaper and faster than developing an application, building a government registry, and redesigning privacy laws.
What about natural immunity passports, which some suggest should be used as an interim measure before a vaccine is available? Requiring people to show proof of natural immunity before accessing employment would create perverse pressure to self-infect among those who are most disadvantaged.
The privileged non-immune would not need to self-infect in order to put food on the table. It is those whose employment is most precarious, and who have no private spaces, who would face the agonizing choice of whether to infect themselves. This is not a choice that any egalitarian society should foist upon its most vulnerable members.
Moreover, natural immunity passports will divide our population into two officially sanctioned classes, those fit to work and those unfit to work. We do not need to look to dystopian fiction to see what is wrong with this. We can look back to our own shameful treatment of Indigenous peoples; our internment of various ethnic groups during the Second World War; our marginalization of people with disabilities.
We have worked so hard in recent years to build a society in which everyone has an equal chance to participate fully in our shared public life. Why backpedal, when it is not necessary?
Our governments should be incentivizing the imaginative re-structuring of workplaces and public spaces, in ways that will enable us to practice physical distancing and will be inclusive of all. We should be sharing the costs of reopening the economy, rather than placing these burdens on those least able to bear them.
Finally, because alternatives are available and because of the unfair divide between the immune and non-immune that these passports would create, there is a real risk that denying people jobs, goods, or services because they are not naturally immune to COVID-19 amounts to unfair and unlawful discrimination.
This concern has not been a part of our public discussions about immunity passports, but it should be fully explored before we ever consider developing digital immunity passports.