Health Passports

HEALTH & BEAUTY HEALTH

GREAT IN THEORY, DIFFICULT IN PRACTICE

By Dylan Roche

As more and more people start to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus that causes COVID19, there’s one question that’s bound to come up more and more frequently: When can I start to do “normal things” again?

It’s a good question, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer. How quickly life goes back to the way it was before the pandemic will vary from country to country and from state to state.

One way some experts have thought about making the process safer and more efficient…health passports. There’s some disagreement on what a health passport would include and how it would be used, but the basic idea is that when a person is fully vaccinated, they receive a passport that will grant them the freedom to travel internationally or even do simple everyday activities like eat at restaurants, go to concerts, or engage in athletic activities.

The idea is nothing new. Similar practices were implemented when vaccines were developed for diseases like polio and yellow fever, and even to this day, the World Health Organization provides an International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) to those who are traveling to and from certain countries. Experts have offered suggestions of something similar for COVID19 for several months, even before the coronavirus was fully understood. In August 2020, the Journal of Medical Ethics discussed the idea of immunity passports—which are slightly different from vaccination passports in that, as their names suggest, immunity passports designate immunity and vaccination passports designate vaccination.

In theory, these immunity passports could be given to people who have recovered from COVID19 and are presumed to have achieved immunity; unfortunately, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports cases of coronavirus reinfection, and scientists still don’t know how long a person’s immunity to the coronavirus lasts or how susceptible they are to being infected a second time. If scientists were to conclusively determine either of these points, then people might be able to get immunity passports with expiration dates or renewal dates by when they would need to retest for antibodies.

But until there’s evidence, the idea of immunity— and the false sense of security it carries—poses a major problem. This is one of the reasons that the World Health Organization discouraged immunity passports in the early months of the pandemic. “People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice,” the WHO says. “The use of such certificates may therefore increase the risks of continued transmission.”

Health passports currently in the works include the International Air Transport Association’s Travel Pass Initiative, the International Chamber of Commerce’s AOKPass, and the World Economic Forum’s CommonPass. Although there are subtle differences, the idea behind each of the passes is that travelers can maintain authenticated, secure medical records via apps that they use to demonstrate they’ve met all health and safety requirements set by the country they are entering.

Discussions on such programs will likely continue as the vaccine rollout progresses, but how they affect the world’s return to pre-pandemic normalcy remains to be seen. As explained by the Journal of Medical Ethics, a health pass could make it safer for more people to return to work.

However, there are downsides as well—namely, those people without passes could grow resentful of those who have them, which behavioral scientists fear could reduce feelings of solidarity that are necessary to control the pandemic in the long term.