Passport realism: You think a phone app will save your life?

Vincent J. Curtis

31 Aug 21

As one of the few Aristotelian-Thomist-Scholastic Realists who still read the Spectator, I find it alarming how many people believe that a cell phone app will protect them from the virus.  You only have to say that it’s the vaccination that protects you, not the app, to realize that it’s true.

A vaccine passport only works when a certain range of the population is vaccinated.  If vaccination rates are very high, the passport becomes a useless encumbrance.  Too low, and it’s impractical to exclude and fire that many people.  The passport is simply a means of coercing people to get vaccinated by making their lives unpleasant, but there are no studies showing that passports change the spread of the virus or alter the course of a pandemic.

Passports do not protect you from the unvaccinated.  In the first place, it is the vaccination that protects a person from the virus; and second, practically all unvaccinated people are not contagious anyhow.  So why the social stigma?  You’re back to killing flies with a hammer again.

About 570,000 Ontarians have been “cases.”  This means it would take over twenty six years to infect everyone alive in Ontario today, absent any other intervention.  Even in this fourth wave, it is statistically unlikely that you’ll encounter a contagious person, from whom you are protected by your vaccination.  So, why are we creating a leper class?  Dividing people into classes is Marxian in character.

Maybe an unvaccinated owner will start excluding passport holders from his establishment.  That would be funny.

Beware of passports.  Once a government program gets started, it is hard to stop – even well after it is useless.

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