How Ethical Are Vaccine Passports? It Depends On How They’re Designed
HALIFAX—As Nova Scotia inches closer to herd immunity against Covid-19, the idea of “vaccine passports” is gaining traction.
The idea is for an official document proving the holder is vaccinated (or medically exempt). That “passport” could be used as part of a public health plan to control who can access certain events or places.
This week, both the provincial and federal Liberal parties made announcements about vaccine passports.
Justin Trudeau’s government said it will issue proof-of-vaccination documents to Canadians for international travel. Iain Rankin, meanwhile, wants to look at adopting “vaccine certificates” that count as proof of vaccination for Nova Scotians visiting private businesses.
Dr. Shawn Harmon is a research associate with the IWK Health Centre and part-time faculty at Dalhousie’s School of Law.
He says it’s tough to assess how effective, legal, or ethical those vaccine passports would be because neither has given much detail about their plan.
But he argues vaccine passports, and even vaccine mandates, “aren’t de facto bad.”
There is an incredible public benefit to having more people vaccinated and vaccine passports help advance that goal.
But unless a vaccine passport system is carefully designed it risks infringing on Canadians’ Charter rights: Section 7 rights guarantying the right to “life, liberty, and security of person”, Section 15 equality rights, Section 6 mobility rights—not to mention loads of privacy rights.
Harmon says the most important thing to consider is how much vaccine passports limit participation in society.
“I think this whole design issue is the key to acceptability,” he says.
There is a big difference, for example, between a system that bars unvaccinated people from government buildings like Access Nova Scotia, and a system that stops people from going to “non-essential” places like a private restaurant.
In his August 9 announcement, Rankin appeared to suggest his “SoctiaPass” would mostly be a tool for private businesses. But even a passport that only applies in the private sector could be fraught.
What if your employer won’t let you come to work without being vaccinated? If grocery stores require a vaccine passport, where will the unvaccinated get food?
These questions are particularly important when you consider how some communities have a harder time accessing vaccines.
New Canadians, temporary workers, refugees, or people new to the health system often don’t have the resources to navigate complex booking systems, or the documentation to speed up the vaccine process.
That means vaccination rates in those communities are lower than the general population. If vaccine passports are required to participate in most parts of society, they would unfairly target those people who have a harder time getting them.
“If you’re going to impose a passport that requires people to expose whether they’ve been vaccinated… then you need to make sure they actually have the ability to get vaccinated in a timely fashion,” Harmon says.
However, he argues those problems don’t “negate the utility or the justness of a vaccine passport system itself” as long as the system doesn’t unnecessarily limit how much a person can do.
Harmon argues any vaccine passport system needs to be rooted in legislation—in other words, government must write a law laying out its system, rather than just create a policy.
That way “everyone can scrutinize it and it’s more easily knowable,” Harmon says.
He also says it’s vital governments take great care with exactly how much information they collect for a vaccine passport, and how much information their passports reveal about their holders.
He would worry, for example, if a digital vaccine passport logged every place it was checked and stored that information in a database.
He also wouldn’t want whoever checks the passport to learn anything more than whether the person is “clear” to pass– that means no information about if the person is fully vaccinated or just medically exempt.
“That’s where a lot of the concern is around the erosion of privacy and just the expansion of the surveillance society,” Harmon says.
He pointed to Ontario, which has rules about who is allowed to ask for someone’s health card and when they are allowed to do it. He said he’d like to see similar limits on vaccine passports.
At the end of the day, Harmon says it’s important to remember why we’re even talking about vaccine passports in the first place.
Covid-19 revealed how vulnerable humanity is to dangerous and unknown viruses. Global heating is fundamentally changing our climate and Harmon argues global pandemics will become more common because of it.
“So we need to think about that context and the importance, that I think we’d forgotten for many, many years, of public health,” he says.
“It’s important to remember that context … when we’re thinking about these new public health-oriented systems that at face value seem like they may be undermining our rights.”