COVID Vaccine Passports: normalising surveillance

Whether we like it or not, it seems that ‘vaccine passports’ are set to become the norm. They are being introduced as a fait accompli by the NZ government and will be in use by the end of 2021.

Currently, most discussion about the passports (and even mandatory record-keeping) has focussed on the question of equity. Criticisms include that mandatory signing-in assumes the majority have android or i-phones and that the problem with the vaccine passport is unequal access to vaccination. This is true: there is a disparity of access to vaccines both within and between countries.

As it could be years, if ever, before access to vaccines are equitable, vaccine passports will ensure travel becomes even more privileged than it was before COVID. Planes will be full of privileged people from privileged countries travelling the world. And some countries will even open their borders to the privileged vaccinated tourist because it’s good for the economy, regardless of the vaccination status of their own population.

However, it is likely that the vaccine passport will not be limited to only international travel. Grant Robertson has said that there is a 'conversation underway' on the use of vaccine passports to access public places and businesses, an idea supported by many, especially those in the hospitality industry.

A vaccine passport becoming a domestic vaccine pass will mean not just dividing the world between privileged international travellers but also the country between privileged people. Domestic vaccine passports could become the key to access both work and social life and, as vaccination rates in this country are not equitable, we will see a new form of discrimination: discrimination based on vaccination status. Researcher Alapasita Teu has pointed out, "It is easy to see us creating a two-tiered society between the vaccinated and unvaccinated." Historically this has been true.

Yellow Fever Vaccination Certificates in the US are said to have helped create and maintain the southern US class system. Society was already sharply defined by race, income and free-status: there were whites, gens de couleur libre (free people of colour) and slaves. However, there were also sub-groups of people who did not have certificates. Only those white non-slaves with immunity certificates could get jobs, have bank loans, or get married and the value of a slave was based on their immunity status. The Vaccination Certificates saw the creation of more underclasses of excluded people. The same will happen here; vaccine passes will create further inequalities and discrimination in already oppressed and undervalued communities.

There are definitely ethical concerns around the use of vaccine passports. And there are also concerns about the practical aspects of the vaccine passport. There are a multitude of questions, including: Will the vaccine passport be limited to use only during the COVID pandemic? Will only vaccine status be stored on it? How will the meta-data be stored? Who will have access to the data? How can we stop it becoming a form of permanent bio-surveillance? 

But there is another deeper discussion about the vaccine passport that needs to be had and that concerns surveillance. This discussion is crucial. Vaccine passports are definitely one step too far on the slippery slope to the normalisation of state surveillance.

Over recent years there has been a huge paradigm shift in our expectation of privacy and surveillance. We have become inured to ubiquitous surveillance. We leave traceable electronic footprints everywhere: think of phone data and eftpos card transactions, or even loyalty cards. Data is the lifeblood and it feels like we give over more data buying a Ticketek ticket than we used to have to give for a passport. A lot of this change is also through (supposedly) freely informed choices: using Facebook, google location, fit-bits and TikTok, and even some activist groups ask people to pre-register attendance at a protest by using an on-line registration form. The introduction of a vaccine passport, though, is at a very different level.

Carrying a vaccine passport around for access to public places and businesses is changing the understandings of privacy. In the long-term it is ensuring more wide-spread acceptance of state surveillance as normal.

With mandatory signing-in and record-keeping already in place for all levels of COVID lockdown and with a vaccine passport on top of that, the government is creating an embedded surveillance system.

It is about now that many people start the mantra of ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ as there is a common belief that mass surveillance is just a passive collection of material with the odd targeted focussing. But surveillance is much more than that. An 18th Century French Minister of Policing, Joseph Fouché, put it well when he said surveillance was needed to maintain control of the population. By watching and observing and noting what is happening in society, surveillance can ensure the ‘preservation of the political regime’ (read The Phantom Terror).

Carrying around a vaccine passport will enable more widespread surveillance, and the result is likely to be a chilling effect on civil liberties.

The COVID pandemic is an ‘extraordinary time’ but the introduction of a domestic vaccine passport is equally extraordinary. The decision to introduce vaccine passes cannot be narrowed down to the immediate choice between surviving COVID and ‘the return to normal’ in our daily lives versus the future long-term ramifications of normalising state surveillance. Practices and laws put in place during extraordinary times do cause dramatic changes in society.

Vaccine passports are complicated and dangerous, they cannot be introduced as a fait accompli.