—THREAD ON VACCINE PASSPORTS—

It appears several EU govts including Ireland favour imposing a vaccine “passport”, making it difficult or impossible to travel internationally without proof of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

This is unnecessary, wrong & unethical, for several reasons:

1. In any situation of vaccine scarcity, it incentivises those least at risk from Covid, the young & healthy, to scramble to get the vaccine ahead of those most at risk - the elderly & frail. So it drives a misallocation of scarce resources, potentially with tragic consequences.

2. It completely rides roughshod over the right to refuse medical interventions. Those who might have reasonable misgivings about taking an experimental vaccine whose long-term risks are uncertain are basically punished for acting on reasonable, conscientiously held views.

3. It automatically creates a two-tier society, divided into the vaccinated, who can travel freely, & the unvaccinated, whose travel privileges are revoked. Think about what that means for social & legal equality & the future & stability of an avowedly democratic society.

4. It is premised on the erroneous assumption that public health requires total vaccination of a population. Herd immunity thresholds can be reached through a mix of pre-existing, naturally acquired, & vaccine-based immunity. There is absolutely no need for universal vaccination.

5. If we have scientific grounds for placing our faith in these vaccines, we should be perfectly able to convince people - especially those most at risk - to take them through rational persuasion. Coerced vaccinations will only raise heckled & spark a needless backlash.

6. Vaccine passports are not just about Covid-19: they are about introducing global health surveillance & coercive medical interventions. That fundamentally shifts the traditional voluntaristic relation between citizens & public health authorities. Advice becomes COMMAND.

7. A world in which govts closely monitor citizens’ healthcare choices & effectively ban healthy citizens from full social participation because they weigh the risks of a vaccine differently or decline a proposed course of treatment would be stiflingly illiberal & intolerant.

8. The concept of a “vaccine passport” as a precondition for travel would make a mockery of the principle of informed consent.

Informed consent to medical treatments & procedures is a basic right of patients recognised in the Nuremberg Code & in domestic & international law.

9/ The notion that universal vaccination is necessary, while hugely beneficial for pharmaceutical companies, completely disregards the fact that MOST people - in particular people under 60 in good health - are not at high risk of suffering serious disease or death from SARS-CoV-2