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by tzs
1905 days ago
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By that argument, the United States must have become dystopian in the early 1900s, when the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) upheld fining people who refused smallpox vaccination. Or in 1922, when in Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174 (1922) upheld a Texas public school not allowing a student to attend without proof of vaccination. There was an interesting piece on NPR this morning on "vaccine passports". It brought up the history of the eradication of smallpox in the US up through the middle of the 20th century and a large part of it was making vaccination mandatory for things like attending school and checking this. They didn't formally have vaccine passports because the smallpox vaccination left a distinctive mark so all someone had to do to check was ask you to roll up a sleeve and they could take a look. They did bring up a risk of vaccine passports that would not have been a risk in the mid 20th century: privacy. With the propensity nowadays to exploit for tracking everything that can be tracked and to tie together all the different databases that contained anything about us, it is quite possible that a vaccine passport system could turn into something more--showing you vaccine passport to be allowed into a store for example might end up being equivalent to showing you full driver's license, credit report, and everything else. Any vaccine passport system should be designed so that all it reveals is that the bearer had been vaccinated, not who the bearer is. I can't offhand think of a way to do that other than having vaccine passports be active electronic devices which might get expensive. |
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