By Chris Powell
Don’t call it a “vaccine passport,” Governor Lamont says. What the state Public Health Department has started providing Connecticut residents is a “digital vaccination card” that uses a state government database to affirm the holder’s inoculation for Covid 19.
Everything about it will be voluntary. No one will be required to obtain or carry the card and no businesses or employers will be required by state government to condition entry or employment on proof of vaccination.
In principle the “digital vaccination card” won’t be much different from what many people already have created for themselves — a digital copy, stored on their mobile telephones, of the card they were given when vaccinated. The new card will be encrypted and direct electronic card readers to the state government vaccination database, which will confirm the holder’s vaccination.
This still isn’t much reassurance for people who want to protect their privacy in the long term. For the “digital vaccination card” will be a “vaccine passport” wherever business and employers choose to require it to distinguish the vaccinated from the unvaccinated for admission and employment purposes. And the state vaccination database will be instantly available for incorporation into a comprehensive and mandatory “vaccine passport” system if government starts one.
But of course businesses and employers already can require proof of vaccination, as by presentation of people’s original vaccination cards. So for the time being the card from the Public Health Department will just make ascertaining vaccination status easier for everyone who wants to ask or tell.
This system will allow the governor to maintain that he is against having state government impose requirements for vaccination for participation in ordinary life, without actually outlawing such requirements in the private sector. Under Lamont policy, virus restrictions will remain a matter of local option.
Theaters, closely packed, whose patrons seem comfortable with restrictions, may require both proof of vaccination and mask wearing, while restaurants and bars, less crowded than theaters and serving patrons who seem to oppose restrictions, may skip them.
The local option policy is incoherent public health policy. But the governor well may figure that it is the best policy politically. While virus infections, predictably enough, are rising as winter deepens and people are more confined indoors, the governor may sense, as many do, that society will suffer more from reverting to lockdowns than from more infections — and that he’ll do better by shifting to local officials the responsibility for any inconvenience.
The government and news organizations easily can quantify “virus-associated” deaths. It is harder to quantify the damage to education, business, jobs, mental health, sobriety, and social order inflicted by lockdowns in the name of preventing infections. But the public increasingly senses this damage and is not likely to stand for more of it even as a state election year begins.
Besides, since lockdowns confine more people to close quarters, they may not do much to prevent infections anyway.
Treatments for the virus have improved greatly in the last year, and even at the epidemic’s outset infection never was a death sentence, since more than 98% of infected people recovered and nearly all virus deaths involved “co-morbidities” that were as much a cause of death as the virus itself.
While the Lamont administration, health officials, and news organizations shout that 75% or so of patients hospitalized with the virus in Connecticut are unvaccinated, the other side of that coin is far more telling — that about a quarter of virus patients are fully vaccinated. Also more telling is the clamor for frequent booster shots.
That is, any vaccine that fails so often even as it requires three or more injections per year isn’t very effective.
Meanwhile adverse side-effects from the vaccines keep being discovered, signifying that the vaccines remain experimental, and critics of vaccine policy are being aggressively censored, which impugns vaccine policy more.
So Connecticut and the country might do best now to resolve to tough out the epidemic. If hospitals get too crowded, virus medicines run short, and more of both are needed, government should be able to finance them by avoiding more stupid trillion-dollar imperial wars and by economizing with its own amply compensated employees.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 