Their freedoms would therefore be de-facto restricted. If digital health passports start to be required as proof of COVID-19 health status to access public and private spaces, some people could move freely – that would be the case of those who would have tested negative for COVID-19 or would have been vaccinated.īy contrast, those who cannot access or afford COVID-19 tests or vaccines would not be able to prove their health status. Enforcing this keeps yellow fever down.Īl Jazeera: What are the biggest issues and risks – legal, ethical, and otherwise – with the use of vaccine passports?Īna Beduschi, an associate professor of law at the University of Exeter: Digital health passports pose essential questions for the protection of data privacy and human rights, given that they use sensitive personal health information to create a new distinction between individuals based on their health status, which can be used to determine the degree of freedoms individuals may enjoy. This is a bit like the long history of needing yellow fever vaccines for many countries. Therefore, if we regulate our air travel/care-home staff/sports events et cetera in this light, we will tend to be safer. Moreover, we do not know enough yet about the length of any immunity or resistance to the new variants.ĭanny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London: If one takes the broadest possible view at a global health level, perhaps yes – people who have had two doses of a licensed, tested vaccine, on average, are less likely to have and transmit COVID than others. The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has raised hopes of an end to the pandemic, but there are pressing concerns that doses are not being shared equitably and are instead being hoarded by rich countries at the expense of poorer nations ĭave Archard, chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics: At the moment, there is insufficient evidence that the existing approved vaccines significantly reduce transmission, as opposed to susceptibility to serious illness, and it is transmissibility that the passport assumes is given by the vaccine. In fact, giving people a passport that says they are “safe” might actually produce a false sense of security that could result in further spread of disease. So, while vaccination certainly reduces risk, both to the individual and across the population, issuing “passports” that divide us up into such black-and-white, binary categories and controlling what we can do and where we can go on that basis does not seem to be justified. It is true that vaccination provides some protection against catching COVID, but it is not 100 percent effective in 100 percent of individuals and, what is more important, we do not have enough evidence to say that vaccination prevents people from transmitting the disease to others. Sarah Chan, a bioethicist at Edinburgh University: One of the main problems with vaccine passports as they are currently proposed is that they focus on the individual’s vaccination status as a binary indicator of risk, to self and others: Vaccinated equals “safe”, unvaccinated equals “unsafe”. Supporters of the vaguely-defined certificates argue they have a critical role to play in ending restrictions imposed to curtail the spread of the pandemic, at least in countries with widescale access to vaccines.ĭocuments showing proof of inoculation against COVID-19 could mean sweeping travel bans and strict stay-at-home orders are able to be lifted, for instance, freeing millions and kickstarting commerce.īut sceptics say they present insurmountable scientific, legal, and ethical issues – at least for now – and should not be used either within individual countries or as a tool to unlock international travel.Īs the debate continues, Al Jazeera asked five United Kingdom-based experts for their opinions.Īl Jazeera: Do current scientific understanding of COVID-19 and existing vaccines support the use of vaccine passports? London, United Kingdom – From Israel to Iceland, several governments around the world are adopting so-called coronavirus vaccine passports as they bid to safely reopen borders, unfreeze economies from costly lockdowns and restore a semblance of normality to social life.
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