HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – Vaccine passports being developed to verify COVID-19 vaccination status and allow inoculated people to travel, buy and eat more freely have become the latest flashpoint of COVID-19. the perpetual American political wars, with Republicans portraying them as a heavyweight – Intrusion on personal freedom and private health choices.
They currently only exist in one state, a government association limited to New York with a private company, but that has not stopped GOP lawmakers in a handful of states from tabling legislative proposals to ban their use.
The argument over whether passports are a sensible response to the pandemic or the government’s reach echoes last year’s bitter disputes over masks, stop orders and even vaccines themselves.
Vaccine passports are usually an application with a code that checks if someone has been vaccinated or has recently tested negative for COVID-19. They are used in Israel and developing in some parts of Europe, seen as a way to safely help rebuild the pandemic-devastated travel industry.
They are intended to allow companies to open up more securely as the vaccine drive picks up momentum and reflects measures already in place for schools and trips abroad that require vaccination testing against various diseases.
But lawmakers across the country are already positioning themselves against the idea. GOP senators in Pennsylvania are drafting legislation that prohibits vaccine passports, also known as health certificates or travel passes, from being used to prohibit people from performing routine activities.
“We have laws on constitutional rights and health privacy for a reason,” said Pennsylvania Republican majority leader Kerry Benninghoff. “They should not cease to exist in times of crisis. These passports can start with COVID-19, but where will they end up? “
Benninghoff said this week that his concern was “to use taxpayers’ money to generate a system that will now possibly be in the hands of mega-tech organizations that have already had trouble being hacked and for security issues.”
A fellow Democrat, Rep. Chris Rabb of Philadelphia, sees vaccine passports as valuable if implemented carefully.
“There is a role in using technology and other means to confirm people’s status,” Rabb said. “But we have concerns about privacy, surveillance and inequitable access.”
Republican lawmakers from other states have also been drafting proposals to ban or limit them. A bill introduced Wednesday in the Arkansas legislature would prevent government officials from requiring vaccine passports for any reason and would ban their use as a condition of “entry, travel, education, employment or services.”
The sponsor, Republican state Sen. Trent Garner, called vaccine passports “another example of the Biden administration using COVID-19 to put regulations or restrictions on everyday Americans.”
President Joe Biden’s administration has largely taken a practical approach to the vaccine passport.
At a press conference this week, Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said he considered them a project for the private sector, not for the government.
He said the government is considering federal guidelines to direct the process around vaccine passports. Among his concerns: not everyone who needs a passport has a smartphone; passports must be free and in several languages; and private health information must be protected.
“There will be organizations that want to use them. There will be organizations that don’t want to use them, ”said Dr. Brian Anderson of Miter, which operates federally funded research centers and is part of a coalition working to develop standards for vaccine certifications for facilitate its use among suppliers.
Anderson noted that the Vaccination Credential Initiative does not make recommendations on how, even if, organizations choose to use the certifications.
In Montana, Republican lawmakers voted this week along party lines to advance a couple of bills that would prohibit discrimination based on vaccine status or possession of an immunity passport and ban use of vaccine status or passports to obtain certain benefits and services.
And a freshman Republican state lawmaker in Ohio spoke out about the concept, saying more restrictions or mandates are not the answer to all of COVID-19’s problems.
“Ohioians are encouraged to take the COVID-19 vaccine for the health and well-being of themselves and others,” Rep. Al Cutrona said. “However, the government should not order or demand a vaccine for our people to reintegrate into the sense of normalcy.”
Florida Republican government Ron DeSantis on Friday issued an executive order stating that no government entity can issue a vaccine passport, and that companies in that state cannot require them. He said he hoped the legislature would pass a similar law.
His order said that requiring “so-called COVID-19 vaccine passports to participate in everyday life (such as attending a sporting event, sponsoring a restaurant or going to a movie theater) would create two classes of citizens.”
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, a newly elected member who has embraced and promoted several far-right political positions, told her Facebook followers earlier this week that “something called vaccine passport ”was a form of“ corporate communism ”and part of a democratic effort to control people’s lives.
And a GOP lawmaker in Louisiana has introduced a bill to prevent the state from including information about vaccination on a Louisiana driver’s license or for the issuance of a driver’s license to be subject to the vaccine status.
In New York, a government-sponsored vaccine passport called Excelsior Pass is being introduced. A smartphone app, shows if anyone has been vaccinated or recently tested negative for COVID-19.
Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo made public the idea of allowing an event to let go, for example, using his own smartphone to scan a concertgoer’s code.
New York officials have not released specific details about the operation of the application, access to the status of vaccination or testing of someone or the protection of a user’s name, date of birth or the location where your code was scanned. The application’s privacy policy states that the data will be “kept secure” and will not be used for commercial or marketing purposes or shared with third parties. But some privacy experts say the public needs more details to ensure their information is protected.
Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Monitoring Project at the Urban Justice Center, a New York-based civil rights and privacy group, warned that the Excelsior Pass creates a new layer of surveillance without the sufficient details on how it collects data or protects privacy.
“Basically we only have UI screenshots and not much else,” Cahn said of Excelsior Pass.
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Associated Press writers Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio; Marina Villeneuve in Albany, New York; Candice Choi in New York; Andrew DeMillo to Little Rock, Arkansas; Amy Beth Hanson in Helena, Montana; and Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, contributed.