Why Canada needs to implement vaccine passports
In the good old days of the first Roman civil war, the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla devised an ingenious method to discipline recalcitrant citizens. In 82 BCE, Sulla ordered the Senate to publish a list of enemies of the state in the forum. Any man proscribed by the list was stripped of his citizenship and denied all protection from the law. Rewards were offered to informants who assisted in capturing proscribed men, and any person who killed a proscribed man split his wealth and property with the state. The wives of proscribed men were forbidden to remarry. Justice was served.
Two millennia later, our civilization is gripped by a different social malignancy. The ongoing pandemic has killed 23,000 Canadians to date, devastated the national economy, and disrupted the lives of each and every person. In less than a year and with Herculean effort, the scientific community has devised several safe and effective vaccines which are finally coming into this country in reasonable supply. Unbelievably, a third of the population has expressed hesitancy to get vaccinated. Even more alarmingly, approximately the same proportion of healthcare workers have refused a shot, despite their priority spot in the vaccination queue and obvious impact on public health.
I am not advocating such draconian means as used by Sulla to overcome vaccine hesitancy and bring an end to the pandemic, but it is worthwhile to note the effectiveness of social pressure to bring about behavioral change. Social pressure can be both active and passive. Active pressure involves proscribing your enemies in the forum and hunting them down. Passive pressure is more subtle, but can be just as effective. Passive pressure in this case could mean exclusion from all leisure and entertainment and the fear of missing out.
For better or worse, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and overpowerful unions prohibit involuntary vaccination, a person’s body is sacrosanct. Fair enough, but another solution exists: mandatory vaccine passports. We may not be able to force people to get vaccinated, but we ought to exclude them from restaurants, bars, schools, sports, hotels, malls, concerts, public events, international travel, and everything else that is fun until they agree to get vaccinated.
Personal sovereignty may be a right, but so is public health and it is the responsibility of the government to safeguard public health. This is no different from other privileges we enjoy. We enforce driving licenses to protect people on and off the roads. We enforce firearm licenses to protect people from gun violence. We mandate vaccination in public schools to protect the population from infectious diseases. In the case of COVID-19, the science is indisputable that mass vaccination is required to end the public health emergency.
A vaccine passport is not discriminatory because nearly everyone is eligible and freely entitled to receive a vaccine (we can make exceptions for those with valid medical reasons). For those who argue that a vaccine passport will create an unfair access system because of the shortage of supply, the government has promised more than enough vaccines will be available for every Canadian by Canada Day.
Other countries see the wisdom and are starting to implement vaccine passports. The Center for Disease Control just endorsed them. It’s only a matter of time until we are left behind and rush to catch up. That seems to be the trend of our public policy nowadays. Individual and societal behavioral change is all about carrots and sticks. It’s time to use the sticks to beat the vaccine squeamish toward the carrots, or this is never going to end.
Samuel Buckstein
