It’s not that I’m an Anti-Vaxxer.
I’m concerned about the creation of two distinct classes of individuals. I’m concerned about the abuses that become possible. We’ve actually been down this road before.
Smallpox was technically eradicated worldwide by a vaccine push, according to The WHO in 1980 smallpox became a thing of the past. That is a good thing. It demonstrates that there are times when we can and should take action.
This got me thinking about HIV.
There was a time when people who had HIV were isolated and in some cases denied housing, medical care, jobs, or insurance.
At the time ethicists, rightly concluded that discriminatory practices on the basis of actual or supposed infection did not abrogate the rights of the individual. Granted, we learned over a period of years much more about HIV and its transmission routes.
During those early years however, testing positive for HIV was essentially the end of your life. Not only did you just find out your had an incurable mostly fatal disease, if that knowledge became public information you could find yourself looking at an ugly accelerated death living on the streets.
That was when I became aware of moves to create legislation designed to protect medical privacy and add more protections against discrimination.
At the time. we were teetering on the edge of allowing rules that actively discriminated based on a health condition.
Imagine what could have been. Camps of the HIV infected, men and women swept under the carpet, out of sight and out of mind waiting to die.
I remember religious TV personalities implying that HIV patients, due to their sin in the eyes of God deserved nothing better. IV drug users were only slightly more important in the opinions of religious pundits. (After all, at least they were having heterosexual sex…)
Fortunately cooler political heads prevailed, and researchers provided various methods to deal with HIV allowing patients to live with the disease.
There was even a brief flirtation with nationally mandated HIV tests for all citizens. This idea was shot down pretty fast because of privacy concerns.
In this age of COVID there are a lot of folks who have forgotten those early HIV years. Here we are again. Even if the government doesn’t step in and create a national Vaccinated Passport system, private institutions are embracing the idea.
Colleges requiring COVID vaccinations to enter campuses, restaurants in some cities requiring their employees to not only be vaccinated but to subscribe to a private database where they upload their status and receive a bracelet with a QA code linking to their records, other employers are requiring you be vaccinated before you return to in-person work.
This is only the beginning. Acceptance of these “Private” standards will eventually lead to the same outcome as a Government Passport. I strongly suspect that the Government will evaluate the various standards and then nationalize the one that works best. (Meaning the one that provides the most private information.)
My concern is that it won’t simply stop there.
Is it going to be okay for your employer to dictate what vaccines you take as a condition of employment? We already have to provide ID, our SSN, and Citizenship status to employers at the time of hire, what if next we must routinely provide our vaccination records too? How about our other health records?
15 – 20 years ago, I was in the hiring process with a company, their HR person noted that I have a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license.
She told me that the company couldn’t permanently hire me unless they saw a bill of sale showing I’d sold my motorcycle to another party and that I had 60 days to produce the bill of sale. “It’s an insurance thing,” she said. I asked her what about SCUBA Diving? “Oh no, you can’t do that either it’s too risky, and you can’t smoke while in our employment either. If we find that you’re doing any of these things it’s grounds for immediate termination.”
She was very confused when I said I no longer wanted to work for the company.
The pay was mediocre at best, and the insurance coverage was really crappy. I tore up the W-4 and associated employment paperwork and continued looking for a job.
Having my employer that deeply embedded in my life made me very uncomfortable. It was almost as if I was signing an indentured servant contract. Yeah, I wanted a job, but not badly enough to give up my personal freedom.
Nowadays my choice could be viewed as selfish, because I didn’t want to give up hobbies or activities that I took pleasure in.
Where is the proverbial line? Would it be reasonable for an employer to say you can’t engage in oral sex because you might develop TMJ, thereby raising the cost of their dental insurance?
How about a celibacy clause in your contract? After all, if you’re not married, you don’t need to be having sex and the insurance premiums could be lowered because there’s less risk of the single employees catching STDs?
Would it still be thought of as selfish to say, “No, I will not give up these activities?”
Having experienced several companies (to greater or lesser extent, a couple of which for whom I did work,) using health insurance as a pretext for dictating to employees what activities they may participate in, I perhaps am overly concerned about mandated vaccinations and vaccination passports.
It’s very much like employers monitoring employees social media accounts. Once the employer has the ability, they will inevitably use the ability to press their advantage.
Would it be right for an employee to be denied a well deserved promotion because of a social media post from a decade before, when they didn’t work for the company? It’s clearly not right on the part of the employer. Yet I suspect that scenario is happening or will happen in the very near future.
Can you imagine being questioned about why you didn’t get a COVID vaccine sooner than you did? What happens if your reluctance to get vaccinated is conflated with an assumption that you’re an insurrectionist? Unpatriotic? A Trump supporter? How about just not enough of a team player?
What impact might any one of those assumptions have on your life or employability in this culture of compliance & conformity?
It’s because I’m wondering about these things and realize that there is zero protection against them that I’m against a vaccine passport. By the way, have you noticed that now it’s just called a Vaccine Passport? Most of us think it’s still just about COVID but already the naming convention is less specific and more inclusive of Vaccinations in general.
To my way of thinking, this loss of specificity is the next step. I have a vaccination record on paper. It won’t be long until the Vaccination Passport will be marketed as a convenient and secure method to maintain all your vaccination records. People will flock to the idea for convenience and put all those records voluntarily into databases sponsored by the Government or not. At that point we’ll lose another bit of privacy.
Does my school, the mall, or my employer really need to know that I’ve been vaccinated against Hepatitis?
When I was younger and traveling for work a lot, I was often sent on trips because I was single. The other guys had families and needed to be home for various reasons. They too were paid a lot more than I was but I always drew the short straw. At one point, I was traveling so much that I simply asked my employer to keep me on the road all the time and told them I’d give up my apartment, (which I wasn’t using anyway.) This inadvertently caused my employer to evaluate how much traveling I was actually doing. When they got the report they were very disturbed. (About 48 to 50 weeks a year.)
When my supervisor was questioned, he said plainly I was young and single so I didn’t have family obligations.
He wasn’t wrong. What he failed to realize was that with that kind of travel schedule, I was never going to have a family because it was impossible to actually date.
I’ve wondered how a vaccine passport might be used in a similar fashion to determine who gets sent to third world countries.
Imagine your boss looking for someone to send to India. They’d pull up their employees vaccination records and filter for everyone who’d had, say COVID, and Hepatitis vaccines. From that list your boss could decide to send you. You probably wouldn’t get any more pay, you might not even get any better chance at promotion. You’d be their India person though.
That might not bother you the first or even the tenth time you got sent to India. Being chosen based not on your skill but on vaccinations might not be the best career path. When you did get tired of it, and asked for a different assignment, you might find that you didn’t ever have a choice. Much as I did when I asked to just stay on the road.
I’m not saying that Vaccination Passports will be abused, I think it is likely they will, because they’re ripe for abuse.
The other concern is that Vaccination Passports inevitably create a two caste society. I’m not alone in this line of reasoning. There are a lot of folks (a lot smarter than me,) writing opinion pieces expressing their concerns over this issue.
Florida’s Governor DeSantis spelled it out pretty concisely when he signed Florida’s law outlawing vaccination passports. However he can only outlaw them for State business or State contractors. What private companies in Florida do is their own business.
Other Governors are requesting similar legislation for their states for the same reason. Generally the reasoning seems to be, The imposition of a two caste system defined by vaccination status is asking for trouble. These Governors want no part of the legal challenges that are sure to happen.
In my entire life, I’ve never been asked for any of my vaccination records, not even smallpox.
When traveling to other countries. As a responsible person, I’ve always checked with the State Department to find out if there was anything special I should be protected against. I’ve also checked with my doctor before traveling outside our borders. Otherwise with the exception of my Passport, and visas being required on the issue of diseases it’s been caveat emptor.
I find it ironic that inside our own country we may be required to produce “papers” to attend sporting or musical events, or perhaps just engage in our normal daily lives.
This concerns me greatly. I just don’t like the NAZI-esq feel of it.
Juliette Kayyem writes: