Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Passport or no Passport

The talk all around these days is: Did you get vaccinated? When are you scheduled for your second shot? etc. We are on our way, carefully, to a brighter future after having had to alter our lives for more than a year. But what happens when it’s over – covid that is. Will it ever be over? Not even virologists know for sure. After all it is a new problem no one expected, and all the ramifications are still in the process of being fully studied and remedied.

            However, when life starts again in a new reality, how will it work? It will be a while yet for everyone to be vaccinated and not everyone wants to be vaccinated. So, what to do?

            Employers, for example, will want to make sure all their employees are vaccinated before coming back to their work environment. After all they have an obligation to protect their personnel. And what about airlines? When people are crowded like sardines inside an aircraft it would be nice if everyone on the flight was vaccinated, especially now that more variants of the virus keep appearing. So how to be sure?

            Vaccination passports as proof of inoculation have been suggested, but there are objections claiming that it would violate individual rights. So how to protect people from disease while protecting people’s rights? Definitely a difficult question to answer.

            I am not Solomon, but I would think that in the situation in which the world finds itself at the moment the rights of the whole take precedence over any individual rights. The loudest argument in favor of that view is the danger to the community. And as we have seen over the last year or so, once disease invades a community it’s a long struggle to tame it.

            And if proof of vaccination becomes the norm in the near future, will anti-vaccine proponents quit their jobs rather than accept a shot in the arm? Let’s hope that they will find that price a bit too high!