France has strict requirements for new vaccines, could this work for the United States?

Dr Bruce Y. Lee, professor of health policy and management at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, said vaccine passports in the United States are not a new concept.

“There is a precedent for vaccine passports, in that if you want to go to school, you have to get the vaccine; if you want to travel to certain countries you have to get vaccinated, ”he said. “It’s not as if these talks are completely out of the blue.”

In fact, vaccine passports were used in the country as early as the late 19th century, Time reports.

Travelers entering the country had to prove that they were vaccinated against smallpox. It could be a vaccination certificate or a vaccination scar on the arm. They could also be allowed in if they had distinctive scars on their skin showing that they had survived smallpox.

Later, proof of smallpox vaccination was a requirement for many types of jobs, especially those in confined work environments such as factories, mines and other industrial workplaces.

Some social gatherings and clubs have asked people to show proof of vaccination before they could attend.

Public schools also demanded that students be vaccinated against smallpox, as they do today against measles, mumps and other infectious diseases.

Thanks to the smallpox vaccination program, the last natural home of this disease in the United States occurred in 1949. The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated from the world in 1980.

Even with America’s long history of requiring people to be vaccinated to enter certain public spaces, there is still – often politicized – resistance to the idea today.

“There have already been political leaders [in the U.S.] insulting the possibility of vaccine passports, ”Lee said.

Richard M Carpiano, PhD, professor of public policy at the University of California at Riverside, said part of the opposition to vaccine passports stems from the fact that many Americans are not used to thinking about what is the better for the community versus the individual.

“A lot of times [the discussion about mandates] masquerades as’ I should be able to do whatever I want ‘, but that’s really not the basis of our social contract in this country, which is,’ You are free to do whatever you want, as long as you ‘they don’t do it harm to other people,’ he said.

The Biden administration said in April that there would be no national vaccination passport, leaving states, businesses and schools to decide how to handle vaccination requirements.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg later said the federal government would support local efforts.

“If a company, a company, wants to take measures to ensure the safety of its workers and passengers, I think, from the point of view of the government, we want to do everything possible to encourage that,” he said. he told KDFW FOX 4 in Dallas. in June. “And that’s certainly our point of view at the federal level.

As with many things related to the pandemic, this has led to a mix of responses from states.

“In the last year we have seen 50 different types of policies unfold,” said Carpiano, “especially with regard to vaccinations and public health”.

This includes vaccination passport policies.

California, Hawaii, Louisiana, and New York have all developed vaccine certification applications. Colorado, Illinois and Oregon are considering similar systems.

Nineteen states have banned vaccine passports, with proposed bans in seven other states. Many of these states are ruled by Republicans.

The other states currently have no position on vaccine passports.

State bans on vaccine passports also vary from state to state, with some, like Arizona, with exceptions for medical professionals. Some bans are already the subject of legal proceedings.

In May, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill prohibiting businesses from requiring proof of vaccination.

In response, Norwegian Cruise Lines sued the state, saying it could not safely resume navigation without knowing whether its passengers and crew were vaccinated against COVID-19.

“We could see [Norwegian’s position] as a staff and passenger safety issue, ”said Carpiano,“ but it also protects their bottom line. “

“They only need a bad cruise [with a COVID outbreak] harm their business and leave a mark on the industry itself, ”he added.

A majority of Floridians agree with the cruise industry. More than 76% said proof of vaccination should be mandatory on all cruises, or the decision should be made by individual cruise lines, according to a University of South Florida survey.

Many U.S. colleges and universities have already decided that mandatory vaccination is the best way to protect their campuses – more than 500 are requiring students or staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Some companies – like Morgan Stanley in New York – have also made vaccination mandatory for workers returning to the office.

Additionally, many healthcare systems are likely to implement their own vaccine requirements, especially after Houston Methodist in Texas survived a legal challenge to its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its employees.

However, even in states that have developed vaccine passport applications, the programs are largely voluntary. This means that companies decide whether or not to require proof of vaccination.

Carpiano said it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“The private sector really has a role to play in vaccine passports,” he said. “We may not think this is analogous to what Macron is doing, but we are already seeing signs of it on a small scale. “

For example, Bruce Springsteen and the Foo Fighters have both recently demanded that spectators be vaccinated.

Yet without a state or national vaccine passport requirement, restaurants, bars, cafes and other small places that choose to require proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test must face the social media backlash of the unvaccinated. .

If the pandemic in the United States wears off, discussions about vaccine passports could end with it.

But the pandemic shows no signs of abating anytime soon – especially with the increase in cases of the Delta variant.

“There are a lot of people who act like the pandemic is over,” Lee said. “But the pandemic is far from over. The question is: how long will this continue? Because we’re not really doing enough to stop it.

Cases are increasing in all states and Washington, DC, with 38 states showing an increase of at least 50% since last week, according to a CNN analysis. Hospitalizations are also on the increase, with young people now hospitalized with COVID-19.

The deployment of COVID-19 vaccines has also fallen sharply since the spring. Less than half of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

At the current rate of vaccination, the country will not reach 70% of vaccines before January 2022, according to a New York Times analysis, although no vaccine has yet received emergency use authorization for them. children under 12 years old.

Despite the vaccine rollout being blocked, those who are vaccinated are highly protected against severe COVID-19.

This led to what CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky calls a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Recent data shows that almost all hospitalizations and deaths related to COVID-19 are among the unvaccinated.

Unless vaccination in the United States picks up speed, further measures will be needed to contain the pandemic.

French vaccine passport rules aim to help control cases of COVID-19 by limiting indoor public places to people at low risk of severe COVID-19 or transmission of the virus.

CDC guidelines because what fully vaccinated people can do safely in public spaces had the same intention, but they were voluntary – which only works if people follow them.

One of the CDC’s recommendations was that unvaccinated people should continue to wear face masks in indoor public spaces.

But Lee said if you visit certain indoor public spaces, the percentage of people wearing masks does not match vaccination rates in the community.

“This suggests that there are people who don’t wear face masks and don’t practice social distancing, even if they aren’t vaccinated,” he said.

With no public places limiting access to people vaccinated, cured of COVID-19 or recently tested negative, local governments are forced to resort to sweeping public health measures to contain the virus.

“What we see [in the U.S.] right now, there are situations like los angeles county, where they come back and say, “okay everyone has to wear face masks indoors,” lee said.