Positon Paper In Opposition To Vaccine Passports
As the Covid 19 pandemic has continued, there has been a significant desire among populations for normalcy to return, with such a desire being made even more potent by the rollout of efficacious vaccines. With the rolling out of vaccines against Covid 19, one of the most prominent issues of contention has been the issue of vaccine passports. Vaccine passports are certifications of vaccination that are meant to reduce any form of public health restrictions on those who bear them (Porat et al., 2021). Most developed countries such as the US, European countries, and Israel have therefore committed to the use of vaccine passports among vaccinated individuals. In this paper, I will provide several reasons in opposition of vaccine passports.
Vaccine passports were first introduced as a way of determining travel eligibility among individuals from different regions during the Covid 19 pandemic. During the pandemic, different governments adopted approaches to zone regions according to the number of infection rates. Individuals were therefore required to have a vaccine passport to be able to travel across different restricted areas. Over time vaccine passports have grown in use to include regulation of access to social and recreational gatherings, government services, and workplaces. Numerous school districts in the US have also issued deadlines and dates where they intend to start enforcing vaccine passports, especially with the recent approval of vaccination among teenagers and children above five years of age. The Federal Government and state governments have consistently continued to advocate for vaccine passports to permit entry to restricted areas such as gyms, hotels, theaters, music venues, and restaurants (Sharif et al., 2021).
The main rationale for the implementation of vaccine passport programs is that public health restrictions that play a significant role in restricting and limiting individual freedoms for various socially valuable activities should be tailored to specific verifiable risks. The tailoring of public health restrictions to verifiable risk has therefore not been the main issue surrounding the issuance of vaccine passports because such tailoring is a central principle of public health practice and civil rights law (De Figueiredo et al., 2021). However, the main issue with public health restrictions, including the broad adoption of vaccine passports, has therefore been the consideration that such restrictions are harsh. The issue of implementation of vaccine passports has therefore been viewed as controversial because although the adoption of such public health restrictions appears to be harsh on a given population, relaxing such restrictions can significantly affect some populations that are more susceptible to the adverse health effects of covid-19 such as elderly people.
The subsequent use of covid-19 vaccine passports to guide various restrictions among populations has therefore resulted in a lot of opposition based on numerous weighty concerns. The first concern related to the wide rollout of Covid-19 vaccine passports is mainly related to the rates of vaccination among low-income populations and racial minorities, which are still significantly lower compared to other populations. This is because racial minorities and low-income populations are more likely to view any government program with skepticism based on their past relationship and association with the federal government. Such populations are therefore more likely to refuse to get vaccinated. By refusing Covid-19 vaccinations, low-income populations and racial minorities are more likely to lack covid-19 vaccine passports and therefore be effectively locked out of society and even suffer from social isolation because of lack of access to recreational and social gatherings, workplaces, and government services in some areas (Porat et al., 2021). The disproportionate Covid-19 in vaccination rates between racial minorities and low-income populations, compared to the majority of the population, therefore raises a concern that vaccine passports could be abused and be used as tools to discriminate and even marginalize the communities who occupy lower social classes even further.
Another significant point of contention related to vaccine passports has been the unclear issue of the extent of protection that is conferred by vaccines, especially against the new variants of covid19. Scientists have therefore not been able to conduct adequate studies to determine the rates of vaccine efficacy on the different variants of covid-19, while the issue of the potential of transmitting Covid 19 among people who have been fully vaccinated has also not been adequately addressed. Finally, the issue of the wider adoption of vaccine passports has highlighted furthe
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