We all want to get back to normal. As the government works on a set of standards for vaccine passports and enlists the business community to adopt the vaccine passport, we are told that we can “get back to normal by Christmas.”
The message of “getting back to normal” is an enticing one for a public tired of COVID restrictions. But we should take caution here. During the pandemic, we were given solutions from the government that were promised as a panacea but failed to live up to expectations.
Based on faulty Imperial College models, lockdowns were seen as a short-term solution that would contain the pandemic. Mask mandates were promised as a way to stop COVID-19 despite ambiguous evidence for efficacy and later evidence that showed less than promised benefits.
Now we are offered the latest “solution” from public health that follows in their tradition of using social control to control public behavior with the vaccine passport. The same recipe is used — the media promising the benefits and discounting the concerns with the familiar message of “finally, this solution will end the pandemic!” while forgetting that each previously deployed solution has had negative costs.
We should take pause indeed. The vaccine passport is the most controversial and divisive solution presented yet, and, as we will see here, the vaccine passport has unintended, unforeseen consequences for our society.