Full article: >No to Vaccine Passports By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY January 7, 2022 6:30 AM >The war on mitigating risk is endless, and it will cost us our liberties, our way of life, and our souls. >Vaccine passports, which have been introduced or promised in over half the American states, are a backdoor attempt to give digital control over the most intimate details of our lives to government minders. And they need to be opposed by everyone who can think two steps ahead — whether they be conservatives, liberals, progressives, Mugwumps, or Shaysites still hiding out in the hills of western Massachusetts. >The first reason to do so is that we simply have no idea what a vaccine passport means in practice — nor even what the vaccine will be in the end. Will it be three doses? Four? Or two plus a proven previous infection? We do not know what the passports will restrict users from accessing. Their jobs? Public amenities? The very health-care services that progressives otherwise deem a human right? A vaccine passport is just a system of control, to do what and for what purpose TBD. >That’s rather the point. >It has to be said that vaccine passports work very differently from one country to the next. I’ve seen this myself. During a recent visit to Ireland, waitstaff at restaurants and bars would ask to see proof of vaccination and would often accept a cursory flash of a photo of a card on a cellphone — with no attempt to really examine the name on the card and match it to a photo ID. In New York City, the process is more punctilious and slightly less pleasant as a result. In Australia, friends inform me it is a digital pass and card that, as Helen Andrews points out, tracks and logs your movement through the world and is now being used by police for criminal investigations entirely unrelated to the pandemic. This form of surveillance will discourage people from, you know, living their lives, even as it proves a bonanza for the data-management firms that are lobbying for its expansion. >Even if we cannot know what a vaccine passport means in a week, we do know that a war on infectious disease is an unlimited war, taking as its battlefield all human sociality. Every breath in an elevator, every conversation at a restaurant, every kiss becomes a potential site of conflict. In the United Kingdom, at the depths of the pandemic, this was quite literal. “Sex banned indoors for Tier 2 couples living apart, No 10 confirms” read one headline, giving the impression that, with a nod, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had just legally compelled all the would-be bonkers in one section of London to take their business to the safety of a garden or balcony, where he could spy them like King David looking on Bathsheba. The war on mitigating risk is endless, and it will, in the end, cost us our liberties, our way of life, and our souls. >“They are not planning on removing vax passports once introduced. This is just the first step to get you conditioned to accepting government restrictions in your daily life via your mobile phone. This digital ID is going to expand to all aspects of your life,” said Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Sure, she’s crazy and went on to call this passport “Biden’s Mark of the Beast.” But she’s also right. New York State is already “exploring how the platform could be retrofitted to verify other types of records and credentials,” according to a report from Vox. @dancingqueen