Is it possible to create a vaccine passport system that can be trusted?

It’s from a 1990 essay by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, titled Postscript on the Societies of Control. In one section, Deleuze imagines “a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier”.

Continues Deleuze: “But the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours … What counts is not the barrier, but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation."

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There’s a few thudding abstractions there, but you hopefully get the gist. Looking up the hashtag #VaccinePassport on social media the other day, I came to this text within seconds: “It doesn’t matter if you are triple jabbed or ‘hesitant’, left or right wing, Vaccine Passports are the trojan horse they will use to centralise our data and control every aspect of our lives. #Together we must stand up and #JustSayNo before we all end up like #WinstonSmith”.

Now, whether @Bel_B30 is actually that happy blonde woman in the Twitter profile pic, or some fiendish state (or non-state) propagandist, is one for the data detectives.

But I hope the point is clear. Old (and prophetic) lefty anxieties about a “society of control”, and yesterday’s meme warrior thumbing out hot jets of paranoia, are just about indistinguishable. We’re in the blender here.

The correct policy on this is, to say the least, emergent. Faced with a population desperate for conviviality, and a virus seeking new clumps of moist humans to mutate within, we may forgive the position-flipping of Scottish government ministers (both green and yellow).

Their privacy-based scepticism about vaccine passports of a few months ago has melted, as infection rates from new variants spike. Our politicians are also flinching at re-imposing quarantines on already exhausted and skint communities.

It’s all-too-human, and we should recoil at any doughball in a suit trying to make polemical points out of how to handle this. I’d prefer to look to the future, and try to answer the anxieties of both the old soixante-huitards, and the folks posting and waving placards.

Can we imagine a system, asking to monitor some of our private data for the sake of collective health and security, that we might solidly trust? What would its design be? What culture would it be embedded in, such that it felt trustworthy?

The vaccine passport is an ideal opportunity to try to answer these questions. The most robust appeal going around is to compare getting vaccinated (and certifying it) to laws that compel us to drive sober with our seat belts on, or not smoke cigarettes in work and leisure spaces.

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Both were bitterly opposed at the time by libertarian voices, as restraints on our precious freedoms. But a different argument – that we shouldn’t be free to knowingly harm the health of others by our behaviour – has definitively triumphed. Isn’t this also the justification for a vaccine passport?

The other well-chiselled argument is that establishing such a passport will compel the take-up of vaccinations. This is the experience in France and Israel, where entry to restaurants and workplaces was made conditional on a pass, and resulted in a huge rush to vaccination. This compulsion rests on a certain epidemiological position. A fully vaxxed population doesn’t just directly protect you (as far as any vaccine does so), but also reduces the social zones where new viruses might mutate and emerge.

But the street protests in both France and Israel show that there’s a genuine watertable of anxiety and fear flowing underneath these justifications. (There’s a rising subplot about the side-effects of taking these vaccines which shouldn’t be underestimated).

For example, do advocates of “no jab, no job” (which a passport would enforce) really think that this will drive non-white and poorer members of the population to get vaccinated? Will their hesitance (partly due to the histories of medical experimentation on minority populations) be overcome by compulsion?

A June 2021 opinion survey was co-authored by Stephen Reicher (above) of St Andrews University, on “the potential impact of vaccine passports on inclination to accept Covid-19 vaccinations in the United Kingdom”. It discovered a worrying paradox in the responses.

“The overall positivity of a population towards the introduction of passports” – and it’s true, there are solid majorities in favour – “may mask processes that alienate critical minorities and may possibly lead to an overall decrease in inclination to vaccinate”. As these resistant minorities tend to live in dense urban areas, where infection is more virulent, this would be a pretty disastrous health outcome.

One of the greatest fears of the passport is that white, older and more affluent demographics – who are likelier to be double-vaxxed –will effectively become a spatially privileged class. They’ll be able to enjoy the full fruits of participation, whether in their entertainments or their occupations.

This feeds straight into the mentality of suspicion-about-systems I mentioned at the beginning - that it’s all the thin end of an Orwellian (or even Huxleyan) wedge. The 2004 “computer says no” sketch from Little Britain shows that there’s been a collective angst about this topic for quite a while.

But where are we able to properly talk about these matters? And not just to overspill our conspiratorial emotions, but to imagine, as citizens, good-enough structures which could answer our worries?

There’s some excellent detail we could dig into. The EU vaccine passport, for example, only retains very specified data – identity, type of vaccine and date of vaccination. We live in an era of appalling info-leaks, so keeping it to the necessary minimum is a good safety measure.

Also, any passport apps that we build should, like Germany’s original contract-tracing app, be open source. This means that their information-gathering functions can be bench-tested by security experts.

This would reinforce public trust – but only if we had a public that had some literacy and interest in the question of how we look after ourselves and each other, in an age of pandemics and extreme weather events.

In the industrial era, many workers became educated in the workings of capitalism by the culture of trade unions. We need a learning process that’s similar – but not the same – for this era of what those French intellectuals at the beginning would call “biopower”. Meaning a politics where the biological – whether it’s the environment attacking us, and us defending ourselves, or some other crisis – is central.

The American critic Benjamin Bratton notes that we’re very well aware of what a “negative biopolitics” might be. That’s the terror which unites Deleuze and @Bel_B30. We have become “dividuals” rather than individuals. This future sees us as near-androids, distantly controlled by a “universal modulation”.

But can we imagine what a “positive biopolitics” might be? As citizens, could we envision modes of personal data-collection whose aim was to maximise the health and life-chances of all, in a challenging era of contagion and meltdown - an era which Bratton characterises as “the revenge of the real”?

It could be imagined. But like workers discussing their class progress as they handled their machinery, we’d have to feel part of the process. A citizens’ assembly on the relationship between privacy, biology, information and the state? That would be the habitual response. I suggest the Scottish national conversation on this needs to be much deeper and wider – as on so much else. Vaccine passports only open the gate.