IMMUNITY PASSPORT

 These are handed out to those who have recovered from COVID-19 for the purpose of travel. 

Immunity passports are also known as ‘risk-free certificates.’

According to the World Health Organisation, use of such certificates could lead to the risk of continued transmission.

The risk of reinfections is mentioned by some infectious disease consultants

Antibody tests do not quantify the amount of antibodies and still hard to say what is protection. 

Many countries are having the testing deficit . Still people will rush for tests to get such passport. It can bring inaccessibility for poor people

Reliability of antigen tests has certain limits 

The “immunity passport system is compromising the privacy as it has no clear provisions for identification and monitoring. 

Other contentious issues would be profiteering by private labs performing tests, and the menace of fake certificates. 

It will further divide the society with different ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

Estonia is building an "immunity passport" system, and Chile is also planning what it calls a "release certificate", following such principles.

This may create a world where the ability to get a job, housing or a loan depends on passing a blood test. You are confined to your home and locked out of society if you lack certain antibodies.

In the nineteenth century, immunity to yellow fever divided people in New Orleans, Louisiana, between the ‘acclimated’ and unacclimaited  

Lack of immunity dictated whom people could marry, where they could work, and, for those forced into slavery, how much they were worth 

China has already introduced virtual health checks, contact tracing and digital QR codes to limit the movement of people.

any documentation that limits individual freedoms on the basis of biology risks becoming a platform for restricting human rights, increasing discrimination and threatening public health 

There is a wrong consideration that, very few survivors are assumed to boost the economy as recovery rate is very slow worldwide and 

The immune certification could easily be expanded to include other forms of personal health data, such as mental-health records and genetic-test results.

The immunity passports of today could become the all-encompassing biological passports of tomorrow.

Instead of immunity passports, we contend that governments and businesses should invest available time, talent and money in two things.

First is the tried and true formula of pandemic damage limitation — test, trace and isolate — that has worked well from Singapore and New Zealand to Guernsey and Hanoi.

Second is the development, production and global distribution of a vaccine for COVID19  

The potential discriminatory consequences of immunity passports might not be expressly addressed by existing legal regimes 

Such certificates are based on the idea that the natural immunity a person develops to any infection will protect them from contracting the disease again.