Vaccination “Passports”: Cause and Effect

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Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that we Americans were a practical people, as we have been throughout most of our history. Let’s pretend that we thought in terms of cause and effect, not vague abstractions or political ideology. Let’s pretend that we didn’t have social media whose algorithms reward us—and advertisers—for circulating and promoting the most shocking and bizarre lies. Let’s pretend that we didn’t have so many scoundrels for politicians, who win elections by promoting those lies.

If all that were true, how would we react to the concept of vaccination passports, i.e., simple cards, apps or documents that verify reliably that a person has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. How would they work as a means to “get back to normal” as quickly as possible? Read on.

First of all, we wouldn’t even ask government to mandate vaccination passports or enforce their use. We’re way past that now. Government at both the federal and state levels has already missed the boats on mandates for masking, social distancing, testing and quarantining, and effective supply chains for and distribution of PPE.

If a government mandated vaccine passports for access to restaurants, for example, we wouldn’t have widespread compliance. Instead, we would have a new political wedge issue, massive resistance, and maybe a revolution. At the very least, we would have demagogues decrying the “assault on freedom” and maybe insurrections like the one on January 6.

But suppose we used a little psychological jiu jitsu against the libertarians who insist that everyone has God-given rights to do what they please regardless of any impact on others and public health.

Suppose we gave every business in America, large and small, absolute freedom to determine when, whether, and how it would require customers to show valid vaccination passports for access. Suppose we let businesses decide for themselves what passports would look like and who would issue them.

Then suppose we made falsifying any passport a felony. Suppose that the Justice Department and prosecutors in our fifty states made that felony a priority, with multiple early and public incarcerations. Finally, suppose they also made a point of defending any business sued for requiring valid vaccination passports of its customers. What would happen then?

Well, as of the date of this posting, 70.7 million Americans are fully vaccinated. Most of them are seniors, because that’s whom the authorities—for valid medical reasons—have prioritized for vaccination.

Now I happen to know how most of those seniors have been living, because I am one. I and all my friends have been mostly sitting at home, watching our retirement income flow into our bank accounts and spending little or nothing, except maybe on home improvement.

And what about the rest of the already vaccinated? What do you think people who’ve been mostly sitting on their income for a year or more are going to do if offered the chance to go to restaurants, stores, and even theaters and sports events—or to fly on planes—where everyone is fully vaccinated? They’re going to stampede to spend. They’re going to make the stimulus of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 look puny.

What will happen then? Well, the businesses that put in place effective vaccination passports and thus attracted massive patronage by risk averse customers are going to rebound so hard they might quickly eclipse their pre-pandemic success. They will probably have to turn customers away.

This trend will have two further effects. First, it will encourage more businesses to do likewise. Vaccination passports will become a business trend—not for reasons of public health, although they will certainly improve that. Passports will spread because they break the dams of public fear and let businesses rebound faster.

The second effect will be indirect. As younger people see businesses opening up to the vaccinated, they will want to be vaccinated, too. Maybe they don’t fear the virus, and maybe they are skeptical of the vaccine. But in our mostly safe and self-indulgent culture, the fear of missing out is among the strongest fear many of us will ever feel. It’s so ubiquitous it even has an acronym, “FOMO.”

So if you want to see a surge of demand for vaccinations, just encourage businesses to require it as a condition of entry. All this will happen without government intervention, except maybe for helping defend useless lawsuits by extreme libertarians and vaccine skeptics.

As far as we know now, the only way to get back to “normal” for real is through herd immunity. That means getting 60%-70% of us vaccinated. We know now that vaccination provides the best kind of immunity, likely surpassing the questionable and shorter-lived immunity of those who’ve been infected and recovered [Search linked source for “immunity”.] And the best way to make sure that everyone gets vaccinated is to exploit natural human incentives, not scolding them or trying to teach science to know-nothings.

We’ve missed the boats on masking, testing and quarantining, social distancing, and lockdowns. But we can catch the wave of vaccination. Just use the natural incentives of businesses to attract customers, and would-be customers’ own native FOMO, to get folks to do what comes naturally. Then the scientists and harassed health workers and can watch from the sidelines, take some breaks, and smile for the first time in over a year.

Endnote: How vaccines work to get us back to normal. Getting everyone vaccinated is the quickest and most reliable way to get back to normal. Flouting public health guidelines, or letting all decide for themselves whether and how to follow them, is not.

The proof is in the pudding or, in this case, the shots in the arms. Mutant virus variants are real threats to individuals’ health and lives. But insofar as we know now, there is no evidence of anyone dying of, or even having been hospitalized with, any variant of Covid-19 after having been fully vaccinated with a vaccine approved for use in the United States. With 70.7 million people vaccinated and counting, and with mutant viral variants spreading rapidly among our fifty states, that’s a promising record.

Furthermore, although the science is not yet complete, evidence is rising that: (1) fully vaccinated people are less likely to carry the disease to others than those who catch the disease but have no symptoms; and (2) getting vaccinated can even make some Covid “long haulers” feel better.

All this stands to reason because vaccines are designed purposefully not to cause disease. Instead, they provoke our immune systems to build up robust immunity without subjecting us to any contact with the parts of the virus that self-replicate and actually cause disease.

The trouble is, we have two competing miracles. The first is the most rapid and effective development of vaccines in human history. It includes the novel mRNA vaccines (Moderna’s and Pfizer’s), which get our immune systems to target only the protein that the virus uses as a lock picker to invade our cells (but not later to reproduce). That’s like disabling a burglar when he’s still outside your home, not inside with crowbar and gun drawn.

But there’s also another miracle, one of human stupidity. In our collective zeal to differ about ideology, we’ve anthropomorphized and politicized a virus that is neither alive or intelligent. It’s a little submicroscopic biological machine that nature and evolution designed by accident, which makes us sick and miserable and a whole lot of us dead.

In record time, our biological scientists designed vaccines to get our immune systems to fight that machine effectively. Their vaccines do so in a matter of six weeks—four weeks (the longest) for the two Moderna shots, plus two more for immunity to mature.

So if everyone got vaccinated, we could get back to normal by year-end, maybe by the end of summer. That’s not just the shortest path to normalcy: it’s also the most reliable. Any other path involves hundreds of thousands more deaths, overwhelmed hospitals and care givers, and yet more disruption of businesses, schools, our economy and our national life. Encouraging vaccination with passports for the fully vaccinated can accelerate our return to normalcy more than any other single thing we can do.

It doesn’t matter what the passports look like, or who issues them, as long as they are genuine and there are stiff penalties for, and zealous enforcement against, falsifying them. After my wife and I got our second Moderna shots, we saved the CDC’s little cardboard cards our vaccinators gave us—the ones recording the type and dates of our two shots. We made copies of them and had the copies laminated in plastic. If everyone fully vaccinated did the same, and if businesses accepted the card copies (and if we had laws heavily penalizing falsifying them), we could have useful vaccine passports virtually overnight.

Coda: A Few Words on Airplanes. I recently wrote a much-lauded post on why airplanes are humanity’s most effective and efficient disease vectors. They still are, especially now with all the Covid-19 variants floating around. God only knows how much they’ll boost future pandemics.

So I haven’t flown for over thirteen months. My wife, who’s more adventurous and has more remote family, recently flew four legs, two out in late March and two back in early April. On one flight, two passengers were wearing their masks below their noses, although the airline tried to corral them, after boarding, with a threatening PA announcement. On another leg, and despite promises of social distancing, my wife was seated right next to another passenger on the two-seat side of a 1-2 small regional jet. As far as I know, that record, on American Airlines, is typical of the precision and care that airlines generally have devoted to keeping their passengers safe from Covid-19.

Before the pandemic, I regularly flew about a dozen times per year, including a few transcontinental and even intercontinental flights. What would it take to get me back on board? Private airlines, in their economic “freedom” and infinite commercial wisdom, would have to act as if they took the pandemic seriously, as more than a speed bump on the way to greater profit. They would have to mandate masks worn properly and social distancing on all flights, accept only fully vaccinated passengers, or preferably both.

Requiring all passengers and crew to be fully vaccinated would probably do it for me all by itself. Why? Because a fully vaccinated passenger is one who took Covid-19 seriously, at least once, if only to get access to perks. The last thing I want to be doing is sitting for hours right next to some bozo who’s wearing a mask under his nose, or takes it off frequently, who thinks he knows more than Drs. Walensky and Fauci and their colleagues at the CDC, and is going to get unruly and yell at me, or worse, if I say anything.

It’s not as if the idea of vaccination passports is a bizarre fantasy. As of April 5, at least three river-cruise lines—American Queen Steamboat, Avalon Cruises, and Victory Cruises—and nine ocean cruise lines—Celebrity, Crystal, Lindblad, Norwegian, Oceania, Regent, Royal Caribbean, Virgin Voyages and Windstar—reportedly required vaccinations (or soon would) before letting passengers board. If pleasure-travel firms can do the right thing, why not the firms that transport the vast bulk of both business and leisure travelers?

So I’m still waiting for the bosses of at least one airline to stop staring dejectedly at their bottom line, stop taking poorly enforced half-measures, get smart, and start thinking about real passenger safety and cause and effect. When just one airline wakes up, I’ll start flying again, and that airline will earn my fierce loyalty, mileage perks or no.

The same applies, of course, to restaurants and grocery stores. I used to shop regularly at Trader Joe’s before the pandemic. I stopped after concluding that its management, notwithstanding its famously narrow aisles and crowded outlets, was treating Covid-19 as a speed bump. Vaccination passports, if well enforced, would get me back right away.

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