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April 1, 2021

The Case for Vaccine Passports

We're in a health emergency and they can stop the spread

 

An example of the Excelsior Pass in New York. (Pavlo Gonchar/Sipa USA
via AP Images)

The Chief

America has a problem, and not just the one about eager social media
staffers for consumer brands trying out really bad April Fools Day
jokes. Just like most of the world, we can't seem to shake the
coronavirus without one last surge. The numbers here

are pretty clear: cases plateaued in mid-March and have now ticked back
upward for the past week. In every other moment in this crisis, once
case counts move back up they continue to do so until a peak. And this
wave starts from a "low point" that's as high as the case count in
the second surge last summer.

The surge is for now concentrated in the Northeast and
Midwest-particularly Michigan-but close to 30 states are seeing an
overall rise. (California, where I'm at and where we had the worst of
the third surge this winter, isn't one of them.) The B.1.1.7 variant,
which originated in the United Kingdom, now accounts for a quarter

of the nation's cases and is becoming predominant in the surge
locations. My penultimate edition of Unsanitized

in mid-January noted that the reduction in cases would be a "false
dawn," and that the more transmissible, more deadly B.1.1.7 would take
hold and create a resumption in a couple months. Here we are.  

The other thing that's happened every time in this crisis is that a
rise in cases has been followed by a rise in hospitalizations, and then
a couple weeks later by a
rise in deaths. Hospitalizations are just starting to tick up. The
difference this time is that we've got 150 million shots in arms
,
and will be adding nearly 3 million more every day. As my Unsanitized in
January said, this is a race between the vaccine and the mutation, and
we still have a chance for the vaccine to win and minimize the
mutation's damage. But only if we get the vaccine passport situation
right.

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**** About 38 percent of the U.S. adult population has received at
least one dose of the vaccine. For people over the age of 65 that number
rises to 73.5 percent
. This is the
population where about 80 percent of the deaths come from, and the
vaccine has proven extremely effective in preventing sickness and death.
In fact the vaccines are a miracle, even better than we dreamed. They
appear to be more effective in adolescents

between age 12 and 15 than they are in adults. And we have more than
just studies, but hard data from the CDC
showing that
people with full courses of the vaccine don't get infected and don't
transmit the virus.

I do think that, like in the UK, the superior vaccine rollout will
prevent at least some of the tragedy of the final surge. But not enough
people have been vaccinated yet, and while we may get to that point in
the coming months, at this point some outbreaks and deaths are baked in.
What do we do to prevent even more? There are lockdowns, of course, but
we've never really done them to a serious degree in the U.S., and the
politics are nearly impossible, as are the economics.

Moreover, we have a large and growing segment of the population that
doesn't need to be locked down, that can return to mostly normal
activities without fear. I got my first shot on Monday, and while I'm
not comfortable with sitting in a restaurant or movie theater right now
I will be within a month or so. It doesn't make economic sense to
prevent that, and there's a real mental health toll to keeping people
separated, especially if they don't need to be.

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So that brings us to the vaccine passport. The idea is that there would
be a record that would allow admittance to businesses where lots of
people congregate. If everyone in a theater or bar is vaccinated, based
on the latest science they won't be transmitting the virus to each
other, and therefore not to the rest of the people they encounter once
they leave. Right now it seems that there's no appetite from the White
House

to create a federal mandate or database of people's vaccination
records, and to the extent that this may happen it will come from the
private sector and the states. New York unveiled a vaccine passport

last week that runs on the blockchain.

From the left I've heard objections like this from The New
Republic's Jacob Silverman
,
arguing that there are privacy and equity issues. The equity question is
a month or so behind the actual vaccine rollout, and its effort to
ensure that at-risk populations can get a shot. The numbers are
improving rapidly off a very slow start. This is called an
administrative "burden," when it's really not much different than
a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy that's rather typical.

On privacy concerns, I don't see why the passport needs to be
tech-enabled at all. Everyone vaccinated gets a card with a record of
their shots. Just laminate that and we're good to go. Yes, they can be
forged
,
but the reality is that very few people, relatively speaking, will go
through that trouble. If it takes that much effort to sit down in a
McDonald's, you'll probably go to the drive-thru.

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I think the Biden team should centralize this, actually, and maybe
create a watermark for the laminated copy. Or states could require
anonymized data and destruction within a set time period. But there
actually is a bigger issue here than user data, believe it or not. It's
mortality.

If Silverman has a better idea to prevent mass death my DMs are open,
but we happen to be in a public health emergency. The variant's power
is that serious. This is a short-term measure to make it safer to live
until we hit a critical mass of immunization. It allows businesses to
reopen and workers to return safely to cater to a large population of
the vaccinated. It's completely legal
and less
intrusive than a vaccine mandate, which would also be legal.

The other option right now is a mass lockdown, which is actually far
more inequitable for essential workers that are disproportionately
people of color, and the overwhelming majority of seniors who now have
the ability to go about their lives.

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That is a conception of freedom that makes more sense than the
conservative objection, which is that vaccine passports are the road to
serfdom .
The conservative concept of freedom is the same as that of a 6 year-old.
That somewhat apocryphal quote
applies
here: "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." When
your liberty to do what you want starts to affect me, it ceases to
become liberty for the greatest number involved. Nobody has the right to
make countless people sick, just like nobody has the right to punch
people.

A global passport is going to be a heavier lift; if we did rapid testing
for cross border entry it could probably work. And of course we should
vaccinate everyone on Earth, and take down any intellectual property
claims

that preempt that. We need to do this to stop mutations from spreading

that may become vaccine resistant. But as a short term measure to stop
disease and restore some normality? Bring on the passports.

What Day of Biden's Presidency Is It?

Day 72.

We Can't Do This Without You

Today I Learned

* I was on the BradCast with Brad Friedman talking about Biden's
American Jobs Plan. Listen here .
(BradBlog)

* The American Jobs Plan is a bet on activist government
,
though a slightly constrained one, as I discussed yesterday. (New York
Times)

* The IRS will send out refunds in May

to people eligible for the tax exemption on unemployment benefits, who
had already filed before the COVID relief bill passed. (CNBC)

* Chuck Schumer is pressuring Biden

on marijuana legalization. (Bloomberg)

* Hedge funds getting closer regulatory scrutiny

after a spectacular implosion from Archegos Capital. (Reuters)

* SPACs are also drawing regulatory attention
,
this from the SEC. (Politico)

* A dosing mix-up spoiled 15 million Johnson & Johnson shots
,
not good. (New York Times)

* Not a single ambassador

has been nominated. (CNN)

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