By Jim Harper

When contact tracing was the theme of the day in COVID-19
response, I wrote approvingly of
the Apple-Google protocol for determining (roughly) who might have been exposed
to the disease. Determining exposure “roughly” was a good idea. By embracing
the risk of false positives and false negatives, such a system could have the public
health effects society needed without plunging people into a comprehensive
regime for tracking their movements, personal interactions, and more. The costs
and consequences of comprehensive digital surveillance make a “good enough”
contact-tracing system better than a “perfect” one.

That insight can inform the current vogue in COVID-19 response:
the “vaccine passport.” My sense of the risk management and cost-benefit
considerations suggests that paper vaccine cards can
have all the effects that society needs without the costs of an overdeveloped
digital “passport.”

The purpose of a vaccine passport, like an ID card, is to convey
particular facts about a particular person to verifiers. “This body has
undergone our vaccination protocol,” says the authority issuing such a
passport.

It’s hardly simplifying to break the communication into two parts. The first part is collection of accurate information. The passport issuer must know precisely which human presented themselves for vaccination — often twice. That relies on the eminently fallible identity systems we have today. Driver’s licenses are notoriously subject to fraudulent creation and alteration. (They’re good enough to administer driving, so we should stop “improving” them.) These documents are surely not being checked closely enough at drive-through vaccination stations to create a factual record good enough for a passport. When I was recently vaccinated, my ID wasn’t checked at all.

The second step in the process is the secure conveyance of
vaccination information to verifiers. A vaccine passport must be secure against
counterfeiting or alteration so that people cannot change the identity of the
person a passport purports to represent, the date of vaccination, and so on.

Try to address all those challenges without creating a national
identity system, which can transmogrify into use for controlling access to
travel, medical care, employment, guns, financial services, and more. You
literally can’t. A system that is good enough to prove that a precise person
has been vaccinated is good enough to deny a precise person a flight, a job, a
gun, or a prescription. Rather than a perfect one, a “good enough” system might
be better.

When I was a younger man than I am now, I thought
I had discovered an important flaw in the payment system at a sizable
Washington, DC, watering hole. The practice was to swipe a credit card and
create a temporary record of drink orders based on the last name on the card.
Over the course of an evening, a patron could go to any bar in the place and
simply identify himself by name to add to his tab. My hack was to go to a
different bar than the one used by a particularly obnoxious person. He wasn’t
going to notice another Long Island iced tea on his tab. (Confession is good
for the soul.)

I emailed a leading security thinker about the weakness of this
increasingly used payment methodology. He was nonplussed, replying simply,
“Most people are honest.”

Most people are honest. That means that most people will report
the truth about their vaccination status if asked. Some might be inclined to
lie if it’s easy, but very few will go to the trouble of procuring and using a
false vaccination card. Let there be proportionate penalties for doing so. Then
ask people. Maybe ask to see their vaccination cards. Chances are, the honest
people will outnumber the liars by a margin that is more than sufficient for
keeping infection rates low. There will be play in the joints. That’s fine.

The vaccine passport seems premised on the idea that our country
is awash in irresponsible liars. The premise could be projection by panicky elites. Trusting
people might help rebuild trust in our society, where using technology to lock
people into “honesty” would cut it down further.

“Technological solutionism” is the
name given to the idea that some technology can swoop in and fix deep-running
economic or social problems. It generally can’t. In this area of public health,
the vaccine passport seems like an overcooked technology solution that makes
the perfect the enemy of the good. Given the honesty of most people, it is
likely that the paper vaccine card is all the technology we need to create a
safe-enough, highly usable, and liberty-friendly vaccination-reporting
infrastructure.

The post The ‘vaccine passport’ as technology solutionism appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.