Golden ticket to resume flying
Vaccination passports are on the way and they could be the ticket to kick-starting New Zealand’s tourism economy. But these tokens of access and privilege will also be battlegrounds of borders and bureaucracies. New Zealand should learn from the experiences of other countries before it embraces what will quickly become hotly desired – and hotly contested – papers of passage.
On Sunday, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said the country was in ‘‘active discussions’’ about vaccine passports, which would allow people to show they had been vaccinated when travelling. He said they were ‘‘almost an inevitability’’ in ‘‘probably the not-toodistant future’’, which sounds like code for ‘‘I’m floating the trial balloon for a policy Cabinet has already endorsed’’.
Air New Zealand is set to try a digital ‘‘Travel Pass’’ app on its Auckland-Sydney route next month. The app, developed by airline trade group the International Air Transport Association, was launched in late 2020 and is being trialled by other airlines, including Singapore Airlines and Emirates.
It allows travellers to securely store and present information related to Covid-19 tests, as well as their vaccination status. The travel industry hopes the Travel Pass will give governments the confidence to reopen borders, and passengers the confidence to travel internationally. Air New Zealand has said it will be rolled out to other routes once the airline assesses the results of the threeweek trial.
Such a passport will act as a golden ticket, opening the privilege of international travel for a select few, and as such it will be a digital marker of disparities in access to vaccines and testing. All around the globe, statistics show that such access has disproportionately favoured the wealthy and the white, even though the essential workers who have had to face greater risks of being infected with Covid-19 were more likely to be the poor and people of colour.
We should also bear in mind that even the debate on who should get access to vaccinations is essentially a first-world problem. As the secretarygeneral of the United Nations told the Security Council in mid-February, just 10 countries had administered 75 per cent of all vaccines, and more than 130 countries had not received a single dose. That is also a reminder that the days of normality, where a Covid diagnosis means nothing more than flu symptoms, is still far in the future for our connected planet.
As well as the ethical and equity issues around vaccination passports, there are tricky privacy and security problems. Scammers have already tried fraud to get past requirements that travellers must present evidence of negative Covid tests elsewhere in the world. The chance to visit New Zealand, one of the handful of largely Covid-free destinations in the world, will tempt some to try to fake their way in.
Given these issues, New Zealand must learn from how such restrictions have worked around the world and take the time to balance risk with potential economic stimulus.
But there is no real alternative to some system of tracking and verifying people’s vaccination status. We can’t afford to wait until the entire globe is vaccinated, and safety for the team of 5 million will inevitably trump ethical concerns. It should be no surprise the privileged will get to the front of the line – that has been the overwhelming lesson of the pandemic in so many ways.
The chance to visit New Zealand, one of the handful of largely Covid-free destinations in the world, will tempt some to try to fake their way in.