Vaccine Passports: An Apartheid for Our Times

In a 1984 commencement address to students at Williams College, the Russo-American poet and future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky warned his audience about the dangers of Evil. The evil Brodsky had in mind was not a religious phenomenon or the stuff of a Gothic novel; rather, it was a palpable social reality that one could not control. As someone who had been tried by Soviet authorities for “social parasitism,” subsequently sent to a labor camp, and eventually expelled from his homeland, Brodsky knew what he was talking about. Yet when I read the commencement address, circa 2010, it seemed a bit removed from my own reality. I could not have imagined I would ever seriously need to worry about Evil, in any shape or form, here in Canada.

The response of much of the West to the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how naïve I was — about this and a few other things as well. Yet it wasn’t until I came across an article published by local news outlets last week that I was moved to reread Brodsky’s commencement address. The article in question casually informed readers that employees unable to provide proof of vaccination in the post-pandemic workplace might have to wear masks, avoid using common areas, be assigned staggered shifts, or perhaps forced to work from home. In short, they might be looking at segregation.

One ought not get too exercised about yet another COVID news article. After all, nothing is carved in stone, the experts cited in the article are two HR specialists no one has ever heard of, and the hypothetical segregation measures introduce all sorts of practical difficulties when it comes to implementation. All of this is beside the point, though, the point being that segregation of people is now viewed as an acceptable part of the mainstream discourse in a country that has always prided itself on being free, just, and democratic — and few see a problem.

To get the usual disclaimers out of the way, I am not an “anti-vaxxer.” One cannot be against vaccinations any more than one can be against cars. Vaccines are not a moral issue but a tool, and COVID-19 vaccines are no different. What is different is that people are coerced into getting them in a way that is, to use a word much overused lately, unprecedented — to such an extent that full participation in normal life, the right to which was removed in March 2020 to “flatten the curve,” is now conditional upon undergoing a medical procedure.

To date, approximately 1.4 million cases of COVID-19 have been identified in Canada; some 27,000 people have died. This works out to a mortality rate of just under 2%, mostly the elderly, particularly those with comorbidities. The number is not negligible, and the lives of the elderly and the vulnerable do matter. But the average age of Canadians whose deaths have been attributed to the virus exceeds the average life expectancy in the country, and it’s safe to say that COVID-19 is clearly not the Black Death. The risk of complications from the virus for someone like me, a relatively young individual with no major health problems, is very low. Why force me to get vaccinated, then?

Here, one’s autonomy over one’s own body is ostensibly irrelevant; the argument for mandatory vaccinations (and, by extension, the use of vaccine passports) is that you protect those around you. As with much else in the realm of COVID-19, you take one for the team. Forgoing the vaccine puts the team in jeopardy and consequently necessitates restrictions. You’re only free to decide what goes into your body if your decision does not harm someone else’s body; your rights end where the rights of others begin.

So goes the argument. It’s not an unreasonable one — as long as your duty of care to others does not harm you. Put otherwise, mandatory vaccinations can be justified if (a) they clearly provide protection to those around you and, more importantly, (b) they will not harm you in any way. Is that the case with COVID-19 vaccines?

As far as (a) is concerned, it is unclear how my not getting vaccinated puts those who are vaccinated at risk. There is even less clarity with (b). The vaccines were rushed through and approved by the FDA in the US via Emergency Use Authorization. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use a new technology (mRNA) whose long-term side effects are unknown. Moreover, the industry behind the vaccines has, to put it mildly, a complicated relationship with ethics. A cursory look at the history of Pfizer (or its subsidiaries) reveals that the company behind one of the leading COVID-19 vaccines has had to pay billions of dollars in fines and settlements over the past three decades to resolve allegations of, among other things, illegal promotion of certain drugs, bribery, and overcharging the UK’s NHS.

According to various news reports, a surprising number of front-line health workers are refusing the vaccine, and I have anecdotally heard of at least two medical professionals who are adamant about not getting the jab. One would think this ought to give people pause. Not at all — all concerns are brushed aside. In the name of the greater good, people are asked to subject their bodies to an experimental treatment produced by an industry with a track record that inspires limited confidence at best. Saying no is construed as an act of abject selfishness that justifies denying the recalcitrant the right to have a normal life.

In a society that is free and modern, this is unconscionable. Some things have been cast to oblivion in the climate of fear engendered by the response to the pandemic — things like Article 6 of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005), which clearly states that any medical intervention requires free and informed consent, and that such consent can be withheld without any risk of prejudice. As things stand with COVID-19 vaccines, consent is neither free (since objectors are threatened with discrimination) nor informed (since the potential long-term effects of the vaccines are unknown).

As with other COVID-19 measures, vaccine passports will set a precedent that, yet again, will expand the window of what is deemed to be permissible for the sake of public health and safety, with potentially far-reaching ramifications for society. Even if governments wash their hands of the business to avoid political fallout and limit their participation to the mere issuance of vaccine passports, leaving their use at the discretion of private enterprises, discrimination will merely have been outsourced to the private sector. Outsourced discrimination is still discrimination.

It is hard to say how many people will refuse the vaccine. Whatever the number, if restrictions are imposed on the unvaccinated, there is a risk of a two-tier society. A two-tier society — one with multiple classes of citizens — is incompatible with a society that counts liberty and justice among its values. It is a society that engages in apartheid — only not along racial or ethnic lines, but medical ones. The argument that it is all for the greater good rings hollow. As Brodsky said in the commencement address, “Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.” Evil always appears dressed up in virtue, and it certainly knows how to make itself presentable. Brodsky again: “Nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, civic conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because unanimity has the knack of degenerating into uniformity as because of the probability — implicit in great numbers — that noble sentiment is being faked.”

We’ve seen a lot of faking of noble sentiment. Like so many other COVID-19 restrictions that led societies to sacrifice freedoms on the altar of Good, the vaccination push has been a remarkable exercise in virtue signaling and in couching medical matters in emotional and moral terms. There is an awful lot of noble sentiment out there, and its frenzied relentlessness casts serious doubts on its authenticity. Vaccination sites have selfie booths and badges for the newly vaccinated. Social networks are replete with people posting photos of their bare arms to announce their vaccination status to the world, often with cloyingly maudlin verbiage — information that once was treated as confidential, and ought to be treated as such even in the narcissistic world of social media, is thus being generously shared with all and sundry. Politicians and monarchs tell their subjects to do the right thing and think of others. Celebrities encourage fans to get vaccinated and save lives. Executives routinely remind their employees to get on the vaccine train during Zoom calls. We must all get vaccinated, and fast, so that our loved ones can get back to doing all those things they miss. We’re all in this together.

Naturally, the generation of noble sentiment requires the identification of the obverse — that is, of sentiment that is not noble. Hence all the talk about “vaccine hesitancy,” two words that suggest some kind of pernicious mental disease in need of urgent treatment. People voicing legitimate reservations are immediately labeled as anti-vaxxers. Online discussions of the risks, adverse reactions, and possible side effects of the vaccines are being shamelessly suppressed and censored (the recent trials and tribulations of a number of highly credentialed people are a case in point). People who do not wish to take the vaccine, whatever their reasons, are viewed as reckless and dangerous — as enemies of the state.

An acquaintance of mine, an otherwise sensible fellow, told me he was terrified of getting the vaccine; he was only doing it to be able to travel. He did not seem to find anything abnormal about the situation. The primary reason to get vaccinated is to protect yourself against a disease, not to attend a concert or travel to Bali. People tend to have a decent sense of self-preservation and will take the necessary measures to protect themselves. The fact that people need to be browbeaten into a medical treatment against a disease raises questions about the treatment and the disease, and not about the people who are being browbeaten. No one should be guilt-tripped or shamed into undergoing a medical procedure they are uncomfortable with and of which their knowledge is poor, and no one should ever be blackmailed into doing so.

That broad swathes of our society are in favor of this kind of coercion simply confirms what some of the brightest minds have always known: people do not aspire towards freedom, least of all when they are frightened. In Defying Hitler, which should be required reading for anyone interested in a first-hand account of how functioning democracies can degenerate into dictatorships, Sebastian Haffner describes the credulity of the German population in the wake of the Reichstag fire in 1933. Few doubted the Nazis’ claims that the fire had been the work of the Communists; even skeptics did not question the official narrative. The fear of the Communists was real, and Haffner understands why so many of his compatriots fell for the propaganda.

But he cannot absolve them of the responsibility for reacting to the subsequent removal of the few freedoms and liberties still guaranteed to them by the constitution with what Haffner calls “sheepish submissiveness.” It’s worth pointing out that the day after the Reichstag fire, Hitler’s government declared a state of emergency that effectively lasted until 1945, giving the Nazis the legal framework to push through their agenda. Haffner believes that the sheepish submissiveness he witnessed may be attributed to certain traits embedded in the German character. Not so. As the past sixteenth months have starkly revealed, this is quite universal.

Nor is this compliance limited to the “masses.” Vaccine-related coercion and the push for vaccine passports do not seem to generate much dissent even among those who are supposed to enlighten the public, defend lofty principles, and question governments when they restrict freedom in the name of security. Aside from notable exceptions — such as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and a few other gadflies — prominent intellectuals, spiritual dignitaries, and so-called thought leaders have been conspicuous by their absence.

In fact, some are firmly on board. Joseph Stiglitz, an American Nobel Prize-winning economist, thinks that as long as the vaccines are available to everyone, vaccine passports make sense. Michel Onfray, arguably one of France’s most media-friendly philosophers, has gone much further, declaring that people are no freer to choose to get vaccinated than they are to, say, sexually assault a woman or drive while impaired. The Vatican initially said that unvaccinated employees would have to find a job elsewhere, although the Holy See seems to have since backpedaled after criticism.

Even Lord Sumption, a former UK Supreme Court justice who has admirably opposed lockdowns, is fairly relaxed on the question of vaccine passports. It’s not that Lord Sumption feels they make society safer, as one would expect. Rather, as most citizens are scared and want coercive measures, Lord Sumption believes that vaccine passports, though regrettable, might be the only way to encourage them to go out again (according to this logic, it is acceptable to oppress minorities for the purpose of appeasing the majority during febrile times, when the latter is particularly frightened — a strange conception of a just society, to say the least).

None of this should be surprising: the darker pages of the history of the 20th century offer many examples of learned men and women who should have known better and who nevertheless went on to stain themselves while defending the indefensible.

Some of the arguments used to justify the introduction of vaccine passports verge on the risible. Their advocates say they are merely an extension of the existing system that relies on various forms of identification such as passports for travel. This is somewhat akin to an abusive husband who explains to his wife that since he beats her once a week, he might as well beat her twice a week. While few would balk at having to get the yellow fever vaccine when traveling to certain parts of the world, the comparison of getting a tried-and-true vaccine in order to travel to Guinea-Bissau with getting a brand-new vaccine to be able to go to work is not an especially persuasive one.

Those who equate “vaccine hesitancy” with selfishness are perpetuating a common misconception that sees egoism as the opposite of altruism. The Russian thinker Alexander Herzen shatters this dichotomy in From the Other Shore. Herzen observes that, far from being opposites, selfishness and selflessness actually coexist in man. You can’t have one without the other. Take away man’s altruism, and you end up with a raging orangutan; take away his egoism, and you’ll end up with a tame monkey. It is necessary to look out for others; it is also necessary to look out for oneself. The more totalitarian a given society, the more clamorous the calls to sacrifice oneself for the greater good; the more unfree a society, the greater the pressure on individuals to turn themselves into tame monkeys. The constant exhortations to think of others and take the vaccine are the road to that metamorphosis.

We live at a time when religion and ideologies appear to have spent themselves, for the time being anyway. Instead, we have entered the age of biopolitics. The spectacular extension of technology into all domains of human existence (specifically, the digitalization of our lives) has greatly enabled the application of biopolitics — it is hard to imagine how lockdowns could have been orchestrated thirty years ago, when most people could not work or shop from home. Biopolitics can be defined as governmental control of the biological life of the citizenry, and the COVID-19 politics of so many Western governments, with its radical focus on saving all human life, is an example of biopolitics in action. While public safety is doubtlessly the government’s duty, Giorgio Agamben reminds us (see Where Are We Now?) that “the flipside of protecting health is excluding and eliminating everything that can give rise to disease” and that the first piece of legislation that gave a state programmatic control of the health care of its citizens was Nazi eugenics.

Thanks to the biopolitics of COVID-19, we thus found ourselves in a situation where to protect life, governments ordered life to be suspended. According to Agamben, human life is the sum total of its corporeal (biological) and spiritual (social) experience, and it was once seen as such. The paradigm of biopolitics has split this experience into two separate dimensions so that one’s physical life is divorced from the individual’s social life. The result is that a life spent in front of a computer screen, cut off from any human interaction, is considered to be an acceptable price to pay if that life is to be kept safe. Safe it well might be, but to what end? As one villainous Bond girl said, there’s no point in living if you can’t feel alive.

Opposition to mandatory vaccinations against COVID-19 and vaccine passports is not opposition to science. It is opposition to biopolitics, a surveillance-based society, the disappearance of people’s autonomy over their bodies, the political instrumentalization of science and the conversion of science into a religion, the bifurcation of the unity of one’s corporeal and spiritual experience, and the erosion of one’s fundamental rights. To oppose vaccine passports is to oppose the invitation to become Herzen’s tame monkey.

Many have found the comparisons between elements of COVID-19 politics and the horrors of the 20th century (namely, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust) offensive and objectionable. At first glance, the comparisons may be hard to swallow. It’s worth remembering, though, that the devil wears many clothes. Steeped in the history of the 20th century, we find it hard to imagine Evil as anything other than a mustached ex-corporal ranting in a Munich beerhall. The risk is that we may not recognize Evil, should it present itself in a different outfit.

Unpalatable as the reference might be for some, vaccine passports and other such “health policy tools” can well turn out to be an insidious new kind of apartheid — one for the age of biopolitics. It is clear that much of the present COVID-19 politics, in Canada and elsewhere in the West, is not about stopping a virus. About what, then? I am not entirely sure. But as Brodsky reminded his students in that commencement address, when it comes to a palpable reality one can’t control, “You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: ‘Hi, I’m Evil!’” The onus is on us to unmask Evil and see it for what it is.