JD Vance: Vaccine passports are a terrible idea that deprive American families of basic choices

Eighteen months ago no one had heard of COVID-19. Twelve months ago most of us were under some form of government-imposed stay-at-home order. Six months ago a vaccine seemed possible at some distant point in the future. And in the last couple of days, President Biden has proposed “vaccine passports”—effectively, requiring proof of vaccine in order to live a normal life.

It’s worth thinking through what a vaccine passport would actually mean. In practice, the "passport" will likely take the form of a digital app on your smartphone. Private companies—grocery stores, sports franchises, and airlines—will scan your passport before allowing you to do anything. The information generated—which vaccines you have, which you don’t, where you go, when you shop—will be stored by our big technology companies. There will be promises not to betray the privacy of passport holders and government regulations against selling the data generated, but they will be ignored and worked around. We have already given away so much privacy to our digital oligarchy; these passports will make it worse.  They also threaten to create an entirely new class hierarchy, at a time when our country has seen exploding inequality and social mistrust. The folks who are most hesitant about the vaccine are Hispanics, Blacks, and lower-income Whites. It’s barbaric to tell people they can’t work or buy groceries—as is being floated in the U.K.—because they’re taking a wait-and-see approach to a radically new technology.  Indeed, what these passports threaten to do is devolve into a Chinese-style social credit system, enforced by our corporate overlords. Once you build the architecture for this kind of enforcement regime, it’s easy to use it to reward "good" behaviors or penalize "bad" ones. Obesity is arguably a far greater public health problem than COVID-19, for instance. If we’re going to prevent people from buying groceries because they don’t have their vaccine, why not do the same if they choose fried chicken over salad for dinner?