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vaccine passports

Cross Post: Selective lockdowns can be ethically justifiable – here’s why

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Written by: Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson, and Julian Savulescu

 

Spitzi-Foto/Shutterstock
COVID is surging in some European countries. In response, Austria and Russia are planning to reimpose lockdowns, but only for the unvaccinated. Is this ethical?

Some countries already have vaccine passport schemes to travel or enter certain public spaces. The passports treat those who have had vaccines – or have evidence of recent infection – differently from those who have not had a vaccine. But the proposed selective lockdowns would radically increase the scope of restrictions for the unvaccinated.

Lockdowns can be ethically justified where they are necessary and proportionate to achieve an important public health benefit, even though they restrict individual freedoms. Whether selective lockdowns are justified, though, depends on what they are intended to achieve.Read More »Cross Post: Selective lockdowns can be ethically justifiable – here’s why

Cross post: Why COVID passes are not discriminatory (in the way you think they are)

Alberto Giubilini

(This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article)
The Conversation

UK health secretary Sajid Javid’s plans for vaccination requirements for frontline NHS workers has reignited the political and ethical debate over COVID passes.

The requirement constitutes a kind of vaccine pass; without proof of vaccination, healthcare workers are prevented from continuing working in the NHS in a frontline role. Other types of COVID passes have been introduced elsewhere, such as the so-called “green pass” used in many European countries.

COVID passes are certificates intended to limit the access to certain spaces – including, in some cases, the workplace – to people who are vaccinated, or who are thought to have immunity from previous COVID infections, or who have had a recent negative COVID test, or some combination thereof (depending on the type of pass). The aim is to minimise the risk that people in those spaces can infect others.

A common objection to COVID passes is that they are discriminatory because they would create a two-tier society with vaccinated people enjoying more freedom than the unvaccinated.

Read More »Cross post: Why COVID passes are not discriminatory (in the way you think they are)

Crosspost: Immunity Passports: A Debate Between Jay Bhattacharya and Alberto Giubilini

By Alberto Giubilini (University of Oxford) and

Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University)

 

crosspost with Lockdown Sceptics

 

[Prof Jay Bhattacharya (Professor of Medicine, Stanford University) and I collaborate on Collateral Global, a new project that aims to evaluate the impact of lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions. We have the same view on lockdown and pandemic restrictions, but we do have our own internal, healthy disagreement. Most people who are skeptical and critical of lockdowns (as both Prof Bhattacharya and I are) are also against immunity passports (as he is), often for the same reasons. I disagree on this point and I think some form of immunity passport should be introduced. In this exchange published on Lockdown Sceptics, we try to explore exactly where our disagreement lies and try to identify possible areas of agreement on the matter. AG]

 

The Case For Immunity Passports

by Alberto Giubilini

Having read the excellent piece in the Wall St Journal by Prof. Bhattacharya and Prof. Kulldorff, I have the impression that they take many of the reasons against lockdowns to also be reasons against immunity passports. Among these, individual liberty is prominent.

I disagree.

Read More »Crosspost: Immunity Passports: A Debate Between Jay Bhattacharya and Alberto Giubilini

Cross Post: Vaccine Passports: Four Ethical Objections, and Replies

Written By Tom Douglas

This is a (slightly modified) cross-post from The Brussels Times.

Should we all be required to produce a ‘vaccine passport’—proving that we have been vaccinated against Covid-19—before being allowed to enter a cafe, travel abroad, or work in a high-risk job?

Some governments are taking tentative steps in this direction. Belgium may require that its soldiers be vaccinated before travelling abroad on peace-keeping missions. In other countries, companies are introducing requirements of their own. Air New Zealand will begin trialling vaccine passports in April.

Many governments have been reluctant to go down this route. Yet the case for vaccine passports is clear: they could allow us to end some lockdown and distancing measures for vaccinated individuals sooner than it would be safe to end them for everyone. This would be a large benefit, since these measures involve severe interference with freedom of movement, and we know that they have serious economic and psychological costs.Read More »Cross Post: Vaccine Passports: Four Ethical Objections, and Replies

Inoculate to Imbibe? On the Pub Landlord Who Requires You to be Vaccinated against Covid

Written by Isra Black and Lisa Forsberg

Elsewhere on the blog Tom Douglas has discussed vaccine requirements for commonplace activities, such as going to the pub, created by the state in the form of law or guidance. Let’s call these vaccine requirements ‘state-originating’. Also on the blog, Julian Savulescu has discussed whether ‘immunity passports’ are a human rights issue. In our view, vaccine requirements or similar raise important issues of human rights in a legal, as well as ethical and rhetorical sense. Legally, since the action of public authorities would be implicated in state-originating vaccine requirements, the measures would be evaluated for their compliance with, among other things, the Human Rights Act 1998 (and therefore the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights) and the Equality Act 2010. The legality of state-originating vaccine requirements would depend on issues of principle (eg how should we trade-off interference with personal life and the freedoms to pursue economic and social activities?), scope (what sectors or activities?), and implementation (eg how to handle any exemptions?)

In this post, we take a different angle. We consider the legal human rights and equality dimensions of private-originating vaccine requirements—for example, ‘inoculate to imbibe’: your local pub requiring you to have had a coronavirus vaccine to enjoy a pint.

Read More »Inoculate to Imbibe? On the Pub Landlord Who Requires You to be Vaccinated against Covid