“The right way is that it should be private, the data should be secure, the access to it should be free, it should be available digitally and in paper, and in multiple languages, and it should be open source,” White House Covid-19 adviser Andy Slavitt said on Monday.
"Private" and "free access" don't really sound like they belong in the same sentence, do they?
This Slavitt guy is talking about a proposed vaccine passport scheme to grant expanded privilege to the immunized in a post-covidian world, a plan posing ethical problems to the Biden administration according to an article found this morning on Politico.
Also technical problems, one might add, including "is there an expiration date to this passport" (we have no idea) and "what about all these new strains" (we also have no idea, although the one in Brazil is behaving very badly indeed).
And if we have a passport for COVID, why not one for measles? Peanut allergy? Non-smoking? Gun-free? And…wait…all those pesky STDs?
Moreover, for a certain ancient generation (of which I am a part) "show me your papers" was the standard fright phrase alluding to Nazi-occupied Europe. So there's that.
What we need to do is get this pandemic under control, not start separating people into even more privileged v. non-privileged groups.
IMO.
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