VACCINE PASSPORTS

A Good Idea or a Step Towards Social Credit Dictatorship?

I confess that when I had my “vaccine passport,” I was delighted to be able to travel again.  But so many people I trusted were opposed to the concept. So I knew I needed to do my homework. It turns out there are a lot of reasons to oppose the concept, not the least of which are that those who are vaccinated (as per Dr. Fauci) have little risk of serious illness from the unvaccinated.  So, what are we protecting here?

National IDs

This wasn’t the first time a national or global ID idea had taken root.  After 9/11, the US government wanted a national ID card with the idea that we could keep out terrorists this way.  It died, for many reasons, but one was that people remembered too many countries using the idea to control the movement of people.  In fact, when I looked into it, I found a great review from the ACLU on their opposition (much of it repeated in their concerns about vaccine passports.)

The ACLU gave five concerns they had about the idea:

1.   They won’t solve the problem and are very expensive to implement.  All of the hijackers were here legally and it is too easy to obtain this ID legally AND illegally. 

2.   IDs lead to a slippery slope of surveillance and monitoring becoming an internal passport.  These approaches never stay restricted to their original purpose and gradually increase government control.

3.   You have to set up a national database of all Americans and then the concern is, who has access to it?  What happens if it is stolen or copied?  You need constant updating of the information and errors can happen (consider credit bureaus).  It’s a sacrifice of privacy.

4.   A digital passport could easily monitor your movements, restricting freedom.

5.   It’s a new form of discrimination as it would make it hard for those who can’t or won’t use smart phones to access it and force people to show their ID, proving that they are Americans regularly.

They felt if really needed, it would have to be paper, decentralized in nature and protect privacy.

Vaccine Passports

Nothing really changed in the scope and risk when this idea arose.  Given the concerns about digital security, most of which are unsolved, more people are rising up to challenge this “good” idea.  What information would be on there to establish that you are who you say you are?  How do you protect this data?  How do you prevent fake passports?  And how do you ensure that they don’t start collecting additional data on your “passport” that you don’t want available to everyone?  Without rock solid federal privacy laws, this kind of exposure could destroy people’s lives and property far more certainly than getting Covid.

Beyond that, these vaccines do not grant absolute protection.  They do lessen the risk of death and as such, are a choice adults make about their health.  I feel little risk being around the unvaccinated and those who are concerned should get the vaccine and be more cautious.  But it’s all about risk tolerance.  I scuba dive and do other risky things.  I don’t want my government to start telling me what I can and can’t do.  That’s not who Americans are. 

The Chinese Social Credit System

Much more official and granular than anything the USSR dreamed up long ago, the Chinese system grants you points for being a “good Chinese citizen.”  This means leaving your faith behind, doing what you are told and never protesting or arguing with any rules, laws or platforms of the government.  If your social credit decreases, you may find you can’t go to college, travel anywhere or perhaps even buy a house.  It enables absolute compliance of citizens because the cost of rebellion is too high.  We’ve all heard about the terrible treatment of those who won’t obey, i.e., the Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners.  Ready to be a transplant donor without your agreement?  It’s much worse than anything we can imagine and yet, it can happen when you are tracked as closely as the Chinese people are.  Freedom would depend on your digital ID as viewed by a police state.  Do we want that?

Beyond that, we’ve seen it make the country far more divisive, pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated (regardless of their reason for choosing to skip the shot).  Doctors, nurses and other health practitioners are being threatened to job loss if they don’t comply, just months after being hailed as heroes for their many months of sacrifice.

Even with a vaccine that can absolutely protect you from disease, we’ve never forced people to take it. This isn’t who we are as Americans.  It’s time to reject this idea and find other ways to keep the relatively small number safe who could be killed by this virus.

(Note on Omicron – analog: moronic.  Viruses over time mutate to far more infectious but less deadly varieties.  This is their nature.  We need to face that this lab-created virus is with us for a long time and deal with it like we deal with colds and the flu.