Watching the “immunity passport” stuff look for which problem it’s trying to solve - international travel? punters entering pubs? staff within workplaces? - continues to be fascinating

Each might be anchored in public health but each use case is very different https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1355830894737707008

Use in international travel brings in international diplomacy, trade deals, right of asylum, and has to be clear why the existing vaccination certificate processes used for yellow fever are inadequate

Punters entering pubs has risk of discrimination, need to rollout processes to many many premises (see "QR codes" passim), staff/customer health and safety, & choices about which decisions should be left to the market and which decisions should be kept with national or local govt

Btw note that if you're using "immunity passports" for intl travel then those decisions could affect how you use them in pubs ("I can come into the country but not go to a pub? Right...")

Using passports within workplaces leads into worker's rights, and back into the risk of discrimination, health & safety, and which decisions are for employers to make vs govt. It will also affect vaccine prioritisation & queuing behaviour

In the absence of govt guidance & legislation some employers will/are plow ahead, but which decisions are left to the market _should_ be an active govt decision

& just wait till those debates hit the gig economy and national debates over who is employer/employee...

Obviously all of these use cases also need underlying stuff: eg ongoing research into whether & which vaccines convey immunity/stop transmission; or work on how to securely and resiliently store, maintain & share different bits of information in different use cases, &c &c

(
p.s. don't even get me started on how many of the tech discussions implicitly assume omnipresent mobile phones or a single, interoperable global data &/or tech infrastructure

*glares at contact tracing apps*
)

Yet, I don't see any depth to the public debate in those different multinational and national contexts

The focus still seems to be on the easy-sounding solution, "a green tick on a phone!", not the hard work to agree what societies might want/need & then get that tick doing it

I mean I know some of the debates are happening behind closed doors, but getting societies to agree to what's decided - particularly in those countries where civil liberties are already butting up against lockdowns/public health restrictions - seems an order of magnitude harder

*switches off from immunity passports again & continues to hold out hope for mass vaccination and eradication strategies*