Take it from this Tacoma Democrat: Liberals should fear vaccine passports

I must be getting old, or at least I must have a long memory.

I remember seeing the 1997 blockbuster dystopian sci-fi film “Gattaca” and being terrified by the implications inherent in setting up a two-tiered society, defined by whether someone does or doesn’t undergo medical “enhancement..”

Today, I’m surprised that many of my friends either have forgotten the lesson of the film or have never seen it.

There’s a lot of discussion about “vaccine passports” — documentation of one’s COVID-19 vaccination status being used to allow people to attend sporting events, travel on airlines, attend concerts and engage in other aspects of public life.

This should be terrifying to everyone, for a lot of reasons. Most surprisingly, the issue has been politicized, with Republicans generally skeptical of the idea and Democrats in support.

Liberals like me have much to fear, though.

We are not far removed from the infamous Tuskegee Experiment, in which Black patients were subjected to unethical experimentation over many decades by the US government. This experience left a bad taste in the mouths of many Black Americans.

When the government’s official policy over many decades is to use you as a lab rat, it makes sense that you may have some hesitancy to allow them to do so again, especially as many of these coronavirus vaccines were rushed through the clinical trial process on emergency authorizations.

Their hesitancy is understandable. If those who are hesitant are denied the right to engage in public life by being denied a passport, it will only exacerbate existing inequalities and racial injustice in our society.

There are some individuals who object to vaccination on religious grounds, and that presents a logistical nightmare for business owners and government agencies to implement any sort of passport system. If anyone can claim a religious objection to vaccination, the passports become useless.

Yet, the law requires an exemption. We cannot prevent people with religious beliefs from traveling on airplanes and engaging in other areas of public life.

Medical decisions are personal and should be made between a patient and their doctor. This is as true of vaccinations as it is of the decision to have an abortion.

Could you imagine the Democratic outcry if Republicans attempted to force women to disclose whether they had an abortion in order to participate in public life?

By creating a vaccine passport that requires people to prove they’ve undergone a medical procedure in order to fly on a plane or attend a concert, you open the floodgates to other forms of discrimination based on a person’s private medical decision making.

Some medical conditions prevent vaccination. Should we force people to “show us their papers” to prove a qualifying condition? When is it appropriate to force an individual to disclose they have a medical condition in order to engage in society?

If a person has an illness that prevents vaccination, they shouldn’t have to disclose it.

Yet it’s reasonable to believe some businesses may be reluctant to admit someone who’s unvaccinated, out of fear they may harbor an infectious disease.

Another area of concern is that private companies may very well be the ones managing these passports. Essentially, we’re telling every American citizen that they must disclose their personal health data to private corporations.

We’ve already seen how Big Tech treats our data: They aggregate it and sell it readily. The potential for abuse is high.

The impetus behind these passports is to provide an incentive for vaccination and to expedite a return to normalcy.

In reality, they would lead to a two-tiered society and cause tremendous anxiety, both for people who are unvaccinated and feel shut out of society and for those who are vaccinated over what may happen to their personal health data.

Consequently, these passports should be rejected.

Mike Moceri is an attorney practicing in Tacoma. He is a former chair of the Washington State Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Committee, an essayist and a rabble-rouser. He caucused for Bernie Sanders with Tacoma Democrats in 2016, voted for Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary and for Joe Biden in the general election.

This story was originally published April 10, 2021 at 12:00 PM.