Vaccine Passports Are Not the Solution

Paris Marx is joined by Elizabeth Renieris to discuss why we should be concerned about proposals for vaccine passports and how they could create a precedent for a larger rollout of digital identity documents.

Elizabeth Renieris is a practitioner fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab and a tech + human rights fellow  at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Follow Elizabeth on Twitter as @hackylawyer.

• Elizabeth wrote about what’s really at stake in the vaccine passport debate.
• The US federal government has talked about leaving this to the private sector, the EU is planning a “digital green pass” for travel, and Israel rolled out a “green passport” for vaccinated people to gain access to various public and private spaces.
• Contact tracing apps did not deliver on their big promises.
• New York’s vaccine passport has already been forged.
• Rolling out vaccine passports has high costs for businesses who will want to use that infrastructure in other ways.
• Parts of the Global South may not receive mass Covid vaccinations until 2024.
• The modern passport regime was created in the 1920s, with the goal being to eventually abolish it. Now borders are being equipped with facial recognition cameras and border guards can check your phone.