Vaccine Passports Are Here to Stay. Why Worry?

“Yeah I use the pass. What should I be afraid of?” That’s Jack, a friend who works in state and city politics, responding to a poll I posted on Facebook about digital Covid-19 vaccination passports. “Are you using one? Why’d you download it instead of using the paper card? Do you have any fears about it?”

The responses were untroubled. Using it: mostly yes. “Now that theater is back, [New York] Excelsior passes are handy, since proof of vax is mandatory,” wrote a critic. A retired teacher noted that the app is more durable; paper “rumples” and gets lost.

And fears? Mostly no. I sent Jack a few off the top of my head: “Concerns about privacy, misuse of digitized biodata, lack of transparency, more info in hands of tech companies and the state in some unknown collaboration.”

“The state already had vax data,” he replied. “I never considered the rest. Which answers your question about whether people were worried, in my case.”

The digital Covid vaccination certification, or “passport,” is a mobile app that instantaneously affirms the vaccinated status, Covid test results, birth date, gender, and/or other identifiers of its holder. The information is usually mosaicked in a QR code, read by a proprietary scanner, and linked to a government registry. Led by New York, California, and Louisiana, as many as 30 states are rolling them out. The Biden administration announced last spring that it would wrangle them under national standards but so far it hasn’t. Internationally, the EU and a growing number of countries are adopting them, from repressive regimes like Bahrain to democracies like Denmark.