On my daily walks, I rarely carry a phone. No one calls me. No one sends me urgent texts. Phone theft at gunpoint has become common in my neighborhood. So I leave the device at home most of the time, and feel freer not being distracted by it while chatting with people at the coffee shop.
When covid started, most nearby restaurants started doing menus by phone app, so I stopped going out to eat. Elsewhere in the world, phone-based vaccine passports started being rolled out. Thankfully, they haven't come to Minneapolis yet. The whole idea of vaccine passports is to segregate the unvaccinated for reasons that are political, not medical.
I'm vaccinated and understand that this reduces my risk of serious illness in the event that I contract the virus. But covid spreads easily through vaccinated populations. All the people who talk like vaccination status has something to do with the covid's ability to spread are fundamentally incorrect. And everyone pushing for universal vaccine passports is in fact pushing for a totalitarian nanny state where even internal biology is subject to surveillance by unaccountable regimes.
Stupid though it may be, there are signs that this new mechanism of control may be more permanent than temporary. According to The Intercept:
The vaccine passport embodies the contradictions of the pandemic that birthed it. It guards borders, divides us from them. It also facilitates travel, and travel is an antidote to tribalism. In either case, it is not going away. Therefore, if it is indeed the prototype linchpin of a future global, digital hyper-surveillance apparatus, we must demand that it be universally accessible, publicly owned and regulated, its workings transparent, and its uses stringently defined.
I'm less optimistic than the author of this Intercept piece. I don't think vaccine passports can be done in a fair and transparent way. They're inherently surveillance and segregation apps with little to no public health benefit. These so-called passports are also vulnerable to all of the things that other phone apps are vulnerable to. Bugs. Security breaches. Data harvesting by corporate actors behind the scenes.
Some of these vulnerabilities could be avoided by moving the vaccine passport from a phone to an implantable microchip. A Swedish startup called Epicenter is trying to push things in that direction, promoting vaccine passport microchip implants. The NFC chips used by Epicenter simplify commerce in certain settings and can be adapted for use as vaccine passports. Thousands of people are already chipped and ready. But the whole idea of a surveillance and segregation microchip implant strikes me as laughably dystopian.
To be fair, if I had to have a vaccine passport, I'd rather it be on a tiny chip than on my phone. I wouldn't implant this chip into my body, though. Instead, I'd carry it in a little pouch around my neck or embedded in a keychain fob. I wonder what Epicenter would charge me for just the programmable NFC chip without the implantation.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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