Suzanne Moore I’ve changed my mind about vaccine passports

Ialready have a vaccine certificate stuck inside my passport. A couple of years ago, I was going to Uganda with the Marie Stopes organisation to report on its outreach work. To enter Uganda, I needed proof that I’d had a yellow fever vaccine. I had it years ago, but of course I’d lost the paperwork, so I had to go and get another jab to get the certificate.

Fair enough, this is a horrible disease spread by mosquitoes. I felt no infringement of my personal liberty to be asked to do this.

Will I feel as happy about being asked to prove I have been immunised against Covid-19? Well actually, to my surprise, yes I will. My surprise is because, in the past, I have been someone who has vigorously opposed ID cards – and campaigned against them.

In 2006, Labour promoted a national ID card scheme. Liberty campaigned against it and so did I, even joining a group called NO2ID, which involved meetings in various pubs. Libertarians love a drink and it was all for a worthy cause.

Civil liberties have to be protected. I have been fingerprinted and had my blood taken for things I never asked for it to be tested for, and appeared on who knows how much CCTV. I was once fined and taken off the bus for not showing the Transport Police any ID when an Oyster card malfunctioned.

My argument with them was it was not the law that I had to carry ID on me. A phone call was put in: “We have a difficult one here.” Me? A middle-aged woman with a travel card? As this faff was happening half the youths on the bus who did not pay a fare at all seized their chance and ran away.

The row over ID cards had ended by 2010, when the scheme was scrapped. The London School of Economics estimated that the bill would have cost between £10.6 billion and £19 billion over 10 years. The arguments made against the cards were mounting. Besides me and my mates in the pub, there was Boris Johnson, who in 2004 warned of the “loss of liberty” that they involved. David Davies said creating a database of private information was the sort of thing the Stasi would do and David Blunkett, of all people, claimed he would “physically eat” an ID card rather than present one for inspection. What a different era that now all seems. Today, I see no alternative to vaccine passports, even with their inherent problems.

So are my principles as flimsy as Johnson’s botched promises of a return to “normality”?

Two big things have happened. Obviously, the pandemic, but crucially the database that everyone in the civil liberties brigade was so concerned about is already in existence. It is part of what Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. As Bruce Schneier wrote, “surveillance is the business model of the internet”.

Every app we use that gives us access to products and services gives companies access to our private data and information in return. This is no longer a matter of private choice, it’s something that, over the years, we have all just blindly accepted. The insane anti-vaxxers who think Bill Gates is going to microchip us are so behind the times. He doesn’t need to. Most of us give away all our information for free on a daily basis.

The real issue about vaccine passports is that they are discriminatory, as only rich countries can afford to vaccinate enough of their population to make them meaningful. But they are already happening. Greece is pushing for them, having made special arrangements with Israel.

The Australian airline Quantas says it will require them to board flights. Etihad and Emirates say they, too, will start using a digital travel pass system. Digital passports seem inevitable. What is not inevitable is the amount of travel that has already happened with no tests or significant quarantine in place. In January, Yvette Cooper raised the problem of people arriving on indirect flights from Brazil. There was no travel ban at that point. Cooper said on February 24 that 15,000 people were arriving a day and getting on public transport. Only 150 of them were going to hotels.

Meanwhile most of us stay indoors and travel is verboten. Why are people not tested on arrival and why are all these people still flying in? I long to travel even though I think the world will never return to the “before times”. Because of this not only do I want a vaccine passport, I want everyone else to have one too.

Before, I thought my freedom could be curtailed by the state having too much information about me. Now I will happily give it, just as I give my blood to be analysed for a medical trial I am currently on.

If that means everyone knows where I am and where I am going, then so be it. I will swap my privacy for the privilege of seeing more of the big wide world. For me, that’s a freedom too precious to lose.

I’ve surprised myself, because I campaigned against ID cards