The Vaccine Passport is No Longer about Safety, But It Pretends To Be
And That’s a Big Problem…
This article was first published on Instagram on March 6
The canadian province of Ontario no longer requires restaurants, gyms, and public venues to screen customers for vaccination status. Nevertheless, many businesses proudly continue to demand proof that customers and guests are fully vaccinated.
While the decision for these businesses has been met with a chorus of online praise, the sober truth is that the passports only screen for two doses, which are widely accepted not to provide any meaningful level of safety, three-to-six months post injection.
And with the boosters still targetting the original Alpha strain, even an expanded three-dose definition of fully-vaccinated would not guarantee a level of safety that is competitive with widespread natural Omicron immunity.
If there is any safety benefit left to wring from the passport system, it’s not worth the squeeze.
And so the continued demand for passport protection indicates either an ignorance of the science or something much more troubling.
It could be that the trauma of the pandemic has left some of us not only still clinging to our safety blanket, but using it to suffocate others.
Or, it could be that continued support for the vax pass is not so much about the illusion of keeping out virus, but the fantasy of keeping out dissidents.
There is an elegant power in the ability not only to banish your ideological enemies, but to call it safety in the process. The deed takes on the appearance of altrusim, when in fact it’s only spitefulness hiding under the cover of care.
Indeed, COVID has created an appetite for punishing “bad citizens” — and the vax pass is proving already to live up to what it was feared to become: an early social credit system, designed to reward those who “did the right thing,” and hurt the ones who didn’t.
Thus, the vaccine passport is emblematic of a decaying culture that overindulges the hypersensitive and empowers the petty. It allows the crutch to rule the community, and it needs to fall away for good before it comes back under some other guise to addle more minds and excise more people from society.
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