The New York Times reports that Europe wants to allow entry this summer to any US resident who has been vaccinated against COVID-19:
The fast pace of vaccination in the United States, and advanced talks between authorities there and the European Union over how to make vaccine certificates acceptable as proof of immunity for visitors, will enable the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, to recommend a switch in policy that could see trans-Atlantic leisure travel restored.
....Technical discussions have been going on for several weeks between European Union and United States officials on how to practically and technologically make vaccine certificates from each place broadly readable so that citizens can use them to travel without restrictions.
Wait a second. The Biden administration has been swearing up and down that it has no plans to create a "vaccine passport." But isn't this the same thing? And apparently they've been discussing it for weeks.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of this. A vaccine passport/certificate is not some kind of big government invasion of personal privacy. It's just something that provides useful information. In this case, foreign governments legitimately want to know if visitors have been vaccinated. Presumably the United States wants to know the same thing about people who visit us. Not only is there nothing wrong with this, it makes all sorts of obvious sense.
Anyway, if I'm reading this right, it looks like vaccine passports are coming soon. Among their other good aspects, perhaps they will also help persuade more people to get vaccinated.
Vaccine Visa?
Jab of approval.
I am really eager to see how we pull this off. In the US the only official records are those cards that anybody with a printer/scanner can counterfeit. Then there are whatever records were kept by the providers of the shots--but those are completely decentralized and idiosyncratic. And there are the records maintained by the insurance companies that may have paid for the vaccinations, at least for those of us who are insured. Those are perhaps a little less idiosyncratic, but coverage is less than complete, and pretty much anyone who has dealt with a health insurer knows that getting accurate information out of them is a nightmare.
This is what I've been saying. We focused (quite reasonably) on getting the vaccines administered first and standardizing documentation second (or not at all), but as the consequences for lacking proof of vaccination rise, there will be a cluster-f of forgeries, false denials, all kinds of problems
It's water under the bridge now, but the US should (like a number of countries) have had a contact/tracking health status app perfected and widely distributed well prior to the start of the vaccination drive (indeed, it should have been rolling this out in March of 2020).
I got my first jab here in Beijing a couple of weeks ago. I was already in the system (like a billion other souls) via my use of the Wechat-based contact tracing app (which doubles as a vaccination status passport app). Within a couple of hours of receiving the vaccine, my in-app status had already been updated to "first dose administered."
Maybe some day my homeland will join the 21st century.
Amazing, what talent the Chinese government has for tracking people. I'm sure we all wish we lived in a country like that.
+1 CCTV camera on the streets of Brighton
I gotta say, responses like this are brain dead. In the first place, any society should WANT to keep track of who is carrying a deadly pathogen, and who isn't. I mean, supposedly the United States was doing this also, via manual contact tracing (until we gave up, because reasons). And secondly, even quite horrible governments are capable of getting some things right. Would you eschew building fast, efficient high speed rail service, too, simply because the eeevill Commies have lots of those?
Derp.
I think mandatory app based contact tracing is basically a non-starter in the United States. It is very possibly good policy, but it just doesn't fly in a democratic society that is suspicious of this sort of thing.
The Asian societies that pulled it off are just very different places. (And of course, China is a totalitarian dictatorship that can do whatever it wants and doesn't care about anyone's rights.)
(And by the way, I certainly wouldn't advocate spending a boatload of money on high speed rail lines over very long distances with no environmental reviews and for the purpose of ethnically cleansing the population of Tibet, as China did.)
How many high speed rail lines go through Tibet? I don’t doubt that whatever China builds in Tibet has ethnic cleansing as a goal... but afaik almost all of China’s high speed rail network is on land that everybody in the world concedes is and has been China’s for centuries.
@limitholdemblog
I think mandatory app based contact tracing is basically a non-starter in the United States. It is very possibly good policy, but it just doesn't fly in a democratic society that is suspicious of this sort of thing.
Well, it's moot now, because the coronavirus long since passed the point of endemicity in the US.
But in the early going? I agree mandatory app-based contact tracing wouldn't have flown in the America. There's probably no legal way to require it, for starters. But in the parallel universe where Hillary Clinton or John Kasich was president, it might have been possible to require interstate retailers and large public accommodations to require the use of such apps on the part of patrons (which is how this stuff works: you, the customers, scan in when you enter a supermarket, mall, etc). Also, there was a discussion at Yglesias's blog the other day, and it was pointed out that revealed preference suggests Americans aren't really so obsessive about privacy after all: in the real world most of them give away information about themselves constantly and with few qualms. Moreover, in the early going (say, March, 2020) most Americans were concerned, frightened and willing to do their part. It seems likely large numbers would have cooperated in downloading a contact tracing app to help in the effort to fight covid (again, imagine if we had had a sane, science-based government at the time), especially if the government had implemented strict data collection rules (China may not have such standards, but that doesn't mean rule-of-law-based countries cannot). Indeed, one suspects the vast bulk of Americans would have welcomed a technology that alerts them to the fact that they were in close proximity to a covid-infected person. And such a system doesn't have to be truly universal to be effective: majority compliance, especially if concentrated among those venturing out to venues requiring mixing with the public, could have been a game-changer.
Anyway, Americans probably write software better than anybody. It seems absolute madness not to use such a basic tool of modern society in preventing the spread of a deadly disease. I believe for the reasons elucidated here it's mainly a failure of government leadership -- not something intrinsic to the American psyche - -that prevented the use of contact-tracing apps in the United States.
Jasper:
You should be very careful about polling data here. In the real world, many Americans won't take vaccines, won't wear masks, and won't distance. They routinely attend superspreader events.
EARLY on, LONG before you might think of this getting politicized, there were huge protests here in liberal California by people upset we closed Huntington Beach.
Sorry, anything involving apps and tracing would have been dead on the water, no matter what some poll said. I am sure if someone had taken a poll in 2019 and asked "if there were a deadly virus that could kill half a million Americans and you had to wear a mask to stop it from spreading, would you wear a mask", masks would have polled really well. That's meaningless.
It is impossible to fairly look at the American public's actions and say "oh yeah, they would have gone along with tracking and tracing apps". No way. Would have been one more manifestation of our freedom to resist it.
We're rebels without a clue.
(BTW, California did have a tracing app, had it early, promoted it, and I downloaded it. Nobody else did. It fizzled.)
I don't know what's going on in your state, but here in California, I had to register with the state and county to get a vaccine appointment, and they took detailed information online. Then I also had to fill out a state provided standardized intake form onsite, which I assume goes into a state database somewhere. The information was also provided to the CDC, which sends me texts on an almost daily basis asking for a progress report.
I suspect if California were asked to generate a list of everyone who has gotten a vaccine, it could do so in a very short period of time. Unless some wildcard doctor is out there giving people shots without participating in any of the intake procedures, everyone should be in the system.
Yeah, I've been a little skeptical of the claims I'm seeing that suggest a completely chaotic process with little or no record-keeping being done. A quick google suggested all 50 states maintain vaccination registries, for starters. It would appear that these mainly focus on children (since it is kids who normally get vaccinated) but would these databases not be utilized for covid vaccine purposes?
I live in California and I went through no such procedure. Just made an appointment through my hospital. I didn’t have to fill out any documentation. Neither did my wife who got her shots at a FEMA site.
California is famous for not bothering with documentation...unless you want to start a business or practice a trade.
Did the hospital not ask you for your name and enter that into a computer, either when you made the appointment or when you came in for the shot?
Here in VA, I’m pretty sure there’s multiple records of me getting both my shots: I had to register on a state website and wait for an invitation to schedule the first appointment, show ID at both my appointments, deal with a daily text from the CDC asking if I have any symptoms, and upload a photo of the card after each shot to my employer (who paid us leave time to go get the shots and wants proof that we did before letting us return to the office). Between all of them, I think multiple computer systems know I’m vaccinated.
Glad you got the vaccine but the poor record keeping and lack of screening is unfortunate. Apparently my sister’s dog has more complete medical records and received significantly better medical care than either you or your wife. Aside from anything else, they definitely should have asked about other vaccines you got in the past two weeks both for safety’s sake and because there’s some discussion about whether, for example, if you have an adverse reaction your doctor has no way of knowing what’s causing it.
To add to this: I had to complete a long on line questionnaire to get an appointment with the Mass. mass vaccination site. So they have every vaccinee's Social Security number, address, date of birth etc. Plus on the card we got is the vaccine batch number for each shot. This is all certainly in the database.
Seems to me it should be possible to make this reasonably fake safe. I would not be surprised though if there were long waiting times for people who ask for the vaccine certificate. On the other hand: Passports are also in a database (otherwise what is the point of machine readable passports?). It seems conceivable to import the vaccine info there so that the passport itself works as "vaccine passport" if read by machine.
It also should be possible to require people to upload a photo of a government-issued ID. That's how it works here in China: when I toggle the health status screen of the app, a photo of the scanned ID page of my US passport is displayed. For Chinese people it's a photo of their Chinese ID cards.
All vaxxx records are housed by the CDC, if not state health authorities.
Every shot I have gotten at least since the meningitis vaxxx back in Nov 2001 has been visible to all of my primary care physicians since then.
Here in WI, your information is automatically recorded into the state's vaccine immunization registry along with any immunizations you may have received from your regular physician. https://www.dhfswir.org/PR/clientSearch.do?language=en
Yup.
That's what I am talking about.
I don’t think that’s right. I’m sure that these health care organizations that administered the vaccine kept records (almost certainly computerized) of who got vaccinated. That’s certainly the case in New York and probably everywhere else.
I received a pass that text message for my Apple wallet which showed the dates and lots of the vaccine I received. I know others who have received similar electronic documents. I think the federal government should begin compiling a database of everyone who received the vaccine so that we can begin getting back to normal.
In the past, the yellow immunisation booklets used for international travel did not need to be protected against counterfeiting all that much because the gain from counterfeiting was not all that much. Why fake having gotten immunisation against malaria? If you were travelling to a place that required it, well, then you were only putting yourself at risk.
We now recognise that instead of the document being an aid to let officials know if you are protected, the point is also to protect others from you acting like Typhoid Mary. Oh, and all of a sudden there really is an effort to fake having gotten your shots so that you can enjoy the same freedoms that more responsible people are being offered.
I don't mind as long as we put off implementation until everyone who wants a vaccine has been able to get it.
The current pool of vaccinated people contains a lot of line-jumpers who used privilege or even lies to get vaccinated before older/sicker people. If we care at all about health equity, we need to make sure that less privileged people have had a reasonable chance to get vaccinated, before we start handing out a lot of goodies.
At present there are still workers struggling to get appointments that don't conflict with work schedules, and low-information people who don't realize the vaccine will be free for them. We need at least another month or two to reach out to them.
This is not a good time to hand more privileges to the privileged.
Being able to travel, socialize, and live an ordinary life are basic freedoms, not privileges.
While the right wing has been wrong about 99.99 percent of what they have been saying about the virus, they are absolutely right that the cost in terms of just the basic suffering inflicted on people in not being able to live their lives they way they normally do is enormous.
And while it's totally justified to say "you have to give all that stuff up because there's a huge public health risk" (and, indeed, we should have had real lockdowns and much more severe restrictions during some of the worst outbreaks), when you start getting into equity arguments, that's very different. The fact is that even a line-jumper is improving the public health, especially when there is so much vaccine resistance out there. And at any rate, "you can't exercise basic freedoms even when it is safe to do so because we want to force you to wait until everyone less privileged than you gets the shot" is not an argument that anyone will or should accept.
Not everything is about the haves and the have nots. This is a public health emergency, and one of the reasons we have done so poorly is because so many people have treated it as a chance to implement their own agendas on other issues rather than focusing like a laser beam on public health. And an important public health concept is that if people perceive there are real benefits if they get the vaccines, that will reduce vaccine resistance. On the other hand, if we tell people who are perfectly safe to do things that they can't, there will be a backlash and fewer people will vaccinate.
Yet we ALLOW no ENCOURAGE corporations to set their own rules governing employment to INCLUDE vaccination or no job !!!!
What's wrong with that?
For the most part I'm in agreement, but there might be some services that really would be safer if they were limited only to the vaccinated. Those people who have been vaccinated shouldn't be held back because some people are still waiting. The EU, for instance, has announced it will soon allow vaccinated Americans to enter. Fairness is important, to be sure, but so is getting the economy back on track.
Are you in favor of these for 'asylum seekers' who arrive at the southern border and are admitted into the US?
And PS, your favorite monocausal theory about the spike and decline in crime has been estimated to be responsible for at most slightly over a third in of the drop in crime, and most likely around 20%
https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_774797_smxx.pdf
This is certain to further flip out the anti-vaxxers and wingnuts who will think they're being discriminated against and their freedom is being stolen and that it's exactly like slavery and lynching and that it's the Deep State trying to make them seem like criminals and they're wrong about everything.
Not that many of them ever travel much further the Walmart one town over, but now they can't even go to Greece or the Dalmatian coast if they wanted to!
There are fairly big chunks of the world that require travelers to provide proof of quite a few vaccinations, not just covid. There's a standard document called an International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (the yellow book) that travelers commonly carry, and immigration people ask for.
When I was travelling in West Africa several decades ago, the yellow book was expected to show evidence of a long list of vaccinations. I see no reason why covid can't simply be added to the list. All international travelers should get used to carrying the ICVP with their passport.
Exactly right. I think people are more concerned about not being able to travel within the US, or to not be able to go to the movies or restaurants or whatever.
If a baker of conscience refuses to sell a donut & coffee to an unvaccinated for COVID19 asshole, so be it.
Or do commercial enterprises only get to reserve the right to reject the patronage of potential customers if those attempted buyers are abortionists &/or sodomites?
Not sure that it would be simple Mom and Pop movie theatres -- do those even exist anymore? And by simply allowing you to watch a movie at their venue, or eat an off the menu meal at a restaurant, is not actively participating or celebrating your anti-vax position.
Maybe if meat eaters could force vegan restaurants to grill them some steaks you'd have a point.
Yes, I have the yellow book vaccination passport ("Impfpass" here in Germany) -- as do my pets (because I have to provide proof of bi-annual rabies vax here, as well as against kennel cough, feline leukemia, FIV and other things if I take the dog or cat anywhere).
When you get a vaccination, they take the label off the vial containing the vaccine and put it in your book, along with a stamp from the doctor/hospital/clinic that administered it as well as the signature of the doctor/nurse administering it. You can't fake it with a photocopy because the actual vaccine batch label is put in the book.
This is no big deal -- I keep it with my passport and it gives no more info than what vaccinations I have gotten and when. There is no additional health information about me in there, nothing about what meds I take, what diseases I may have (had) or anything -- in other words, there is NO INVASION OF MY PRIVACY in any way, shape or form. Also helps remind me when I need to have follow-up shots (like tetanus every 10 years, which is due again next year, I see, by leafing through the document). Recently I have added in vaccinations for pneumonia and for shingles.
This is really much ado about nothing. But that's the specialty of the GQP.
One thing that is suddenly happening in Germany is that people are selling stolen vaccination passports with fake vaccination stamps in them. Apparently some enterprising criminals stole a bunch of blank books and are pasting the fake stickers in them, adding fake stamps, and selling them to antivaxers so that they can add their name and data to fake having gotten the shots.
I get why the things weren't designed to be more robust before, because the effort involved was a waste. Why buy something you can get at any doctor, and was only for your own good? It's the new talk of granting vaccinated people more freedom that has sparked this new interest.
Well! It ain't digital, is it? Just dead trees and yellow paper? We must reinvent the wheel now! (I brought my International Certificate in when I got my Moderna vaccine and had it entered by the nurse.)
I think the main issue is that the international vaccination booklet wasn't designed to resist counterfeiting. With the talk of making things easier for those vaccinated, suddenly there is interest in buying forged certificate booklets.
"Wait a second. The Biden administration has been swearing up and down that it has no plans to create a "vaccine passport." But isn't this the same thing? And apparently they've been discussing it for weeks."
That's the Biden administration's nod to bipartisanship. What else can you do when a sizable fraction of the citizenry is still drunk on MAGA?
FWIW, I already have a Hipaa compliant Health Pass, (in one of those electronic unique to myself, square.y thingy's, currently used for all kinds of pass purposes).
I am surprised that no one else has mentioned receiving one...I got my via email without asking...from Carbon Heath, the (unknown to me), people that ran the Dodger Stadium Moderna Vaccination program.
It is little know that it was Sean Penn's Foundation that ran the outside operations, and since he did so well, (in my opinion) in Haiti, it could be that Carbon Health is also under his umbrella.
I don't know, this is not an area of my expertise, but all of the Dodger Stadium operation, (except for the first day), was run so well that it would not surprise me it this was also part of the Sean Penn gig.
(yes I know there were labor complaints, yes there was a LA Times letter from Mr Penn telling dissatisfied works to just leave/exit, he didn't want them working for him if they were not interested in the public good. While in line on both occasions I spoke to various workers...all seemed fine with the program & working conditions).
Circling back, I already have a Hipaa compliant Health Pass without asking in addition to my CDC card. This should be easy.
Best Wishes, Traveller
There is a difference between supplying "vaccine passports" to those requesting them, and other nations requiring them, vs. requiring said passports in the US.
The outcry against "passports" here are because they might be needed to go grocery shopping or to the movies. Nothing to due with foreign travel.
Exactly. I think KD knows this. Not sure what he's getting at with this post.
Trying to protect himself from the bad faith rejoinders of people like you.
Who are people like me?
There's no one like you.
I really don’t care anymore. The whole country has spent the past sixty years bending over backwards to accommodate those people and spare their tender feelings. We need to do what’s best for the country. If that means MAGA-assholes can’t go the the grocery store or eat in a restaurant or hold down a job, that’s nothing to me. Screw them.
+1
I don't think I've heard anyone suggesting vaccine passports should be required for grocery shopping since those serve essential needs. By contrast, movie theaters are not only non-essential, they also normally have people sitting closely together for extended periods of time and are thus particularly risky places for viral spread. To implement a passport requirement for such places makes simple economic and health sense. It's not a matter of "punishing" those who have not yet been inoculated (or refuse to be), but it's rather about creating the best and quickest way to allow businesses to safely return to normal operation. Of course, the freedoms granted to the passport holders also conveniently provide additional motivation to the vaccine hold outs. The alternative (not distinguishing between those inoculated and those not) would be to needlessly extend the social distancing and mask requirements for everyone, which would delay any chance for an economic recovery that much longer.
De facto, there already exists a vaccine passport. You got the shot and a little card, right? All that's left is for states to implement systems to check and verify. Hawaii's about to do that for interisland travelers next month.
Given how lax we know Hawai'i recordkeeeping to be, per Barry Hussein's forged birth certificate, I question how well they can pull this off.
The last time I was in Hawaii (Feb 2021) they did a great job at record keeping. You had to upload proof of a negative covid test to their website & get a QR code on your phone (or printout of the code) before you boarded your plane to Hawaii... or you got shunted into mandatory quarantine or back onto a flight out of Hawaii. Nobody slipped through the cracks - not even the people who claimed to be Hawaii residents but lacked any proof of testing.
I'll assume you knew Monty was cracking a joke and were simply providing actual, crunchy reality. The gods forbid you thought he was serious about President Obama's birth certificate!
Well, you still have to wear a mask to Costco and everywhere else I might go, (I got gently chided for running into an Office Depot just before closing on Thursday night...I was embarrassed and went back out to the car to retrieve a mask.)
There is a special section for vaccinated people at Dodger Stadium now, or so I so read.
When will normal come...a pressing personal concern is when will I return to normal?
I just received an invitation to an opening comedy club....and I am desperately curious as to what jokes are possible in the MeTo era.
But I don't think I am going to go...I did accept an invite to a showing of the Trial of the Chicago 7....that left me terribly depressed, (all we accomplished was the election of Nixon and the deaths of 26,000 more US Soldiers as well as upwards of 1million dead peasants across Indochine. I did not know that the movie would depress me that badly.)
Post vaccination, I have been to one dinner out, Starbucks once....everyone is startled and happy to see me...but I am not really there yet.
Pretty pitiful if you ask me...almost a failing human being.
I was doing better when I was seven years old.
Traveller
Since we've been vaccinated, we go out to dinner every week. It's the least we can do, to help the economy and the unfortunate restaurant workers who have suffered so much unemployment. (I know, I remind myself of Mother Theresa.) Once you are sitting at the table, there is apparently some little understood medical process whereby you can take off your mask and still pose no danger to others.
When you eat out, do you worry about unvaccinated restaurant staff spreading variant covid-19 to customers?
If you were going to a baseball game, which would you prefer?
a. To sit in a special outfield section of fully vaccinated fans for a premium price ($121 & up), with no social distancing.
b. To sit in any other section of the ballpark with the general public for the regular ticket price with social distancing.
That's the choice that the Dodgers are offering, and apparently the first option was almost sold out this past few days.
https://www.latimes.com/sports/dodgers/story/2021-04-21/dodgers-stadium-vaccinated-fan-seats-padres
I don't get it. Shouldn't fully vaccinated people get a better deal than paying a higher price to sit elbow-to-elbow with strangers in what we normally call the cheap seats?
I think that's a product of (a) novelty and scarcity and (b) how insanely good the Dodgers are.
I expect the main attraction is being able to dispense with social distancing, and enjoy a (substantially) pre-pandemic experience. Otherwise, though, the savvy move for the vaccinated and budget-minded is to sit in the cheap seats, relaxed in the knowledge they won't be infected by the hoi polloi surrounding them.
The complaints and fearmongering about vaccine passports expose (once again) the partisan demagoguery of the GQP. On the one hand they shout about how the economy needs to be opened up, and then they (in the same breath) demonize vaccine passports -- which clearly are the best, quickest, and safest way to actually return the country to a fully functioning economy.
When I got my card, it had the lot numbers but I filled out the rest... Name, date, etc. Does that still count?
Any word on when / if Canada will be opening up this summer for US travelers?
I don't think the Biden admin's denial of instituting a vaccine passport had to do with international travel. It would make sense to have such a documents/procedure, especially if other countries demand it. (And I believe some form of this existed already.) The main objection to vaccine passports, and what Biden was saying they were not implementing, is requiring a passport (i.e. proof of vaccination) for domestic activities.
If Branson, MO requires a vaccine passport then MAGA-t nation may take it seriously.
So Biden admin lied?