Ethical: The most obvious use case for vaccine passports is for international travel, which has been crippled by onerous quarantine restrictions. But such a system risks locking out billions of people who are unable or unwilling to get the vaccine.
The EU has been discussing the creation of a vaccine passport, with tourism-dependent countries like Greece leading the charge. But Germany and France — where the vaccine rollout has been low and hesitancy is high — have reservations, and any such system looks to be months away.
A bigger ethical concern is the many people in developing countries who may not get access to vaccines of any sort for months or even years while rich nations hoard supplies.
And if vaccine passports are used not just for international travel but to allow people to work and engage in social life domestically, they could create cripplingly unequal barriers that might paradoxically reinforce vaccine hesitancy.
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