And on it goes. Professional sports are going to want to employ vaccine passports, especially once they are allowed to fill up their arenas. Concert venues will, too. And Broadway theaters and cruise lines; really, just about anywhere that people come in close contact.
Vaccine passports aren’t the death knell of liberty that opponents proclaim. Many people have come to take for granted a lot of mandated safety requirements that they resisted at first such as car seat belts and motorcycle helmets in some states. “Everyone is sick of masks,” Donald G. McNeil Jr., the former New York Times pandemic reporter, wrote recently. “So the only way we’re going to finish it is through vaccination. And we do need to know who’s vaccinated.”
As I mentioned earlier, the Excelsior Pass that I downloaded doesn’t just show that I’m vaccinated, it can also keep track of Covid-19 tests. So far, venues such as Yankee Stadium allow the unvaccinated in as long as they can show they had either a negative PCR or rapid antigen test within the previous 72 hours. I suspect most other places will do the same.
Thus, people who object to the Covid-19 vaccine can’t complain of being discriminated against. They can go to ballgames or concerts and sit side by side with the vaccinated.
But, perhaps unwittingly, allowing people to be tested instead of vaccinated also provides incentive for full vaccination. Imagine being an unvaccinated Yankees’ season-ticket holder. Such a person would have to take a Covid-19 test a few days before most home games. Getting vaccinated, on the other hand, means never having to be tested again. The Covid-19 test requirement thus becomes what behavioral economists like to call a “nudge” to encourage vaccination.
Richard Thaler, the Nobel-prize winning behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, says vaccine passports should feel like a “perk to those who have been inoculated”—one that would lure the more reluctant to get their jabs as well.
It’s pointless to argue against vaccine passports. They are simply too useful to set aside. Once they are in use for European travel and crowded events, even resisters such as Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida will most likely tamp down their political objections. (Abbott has forbidden any state agency to require a vaccine passport. DeSantis has gone even further: He has said that private businesses cannot mandate vaccine passports. However, it is difficult to see how he will be able to enforce such a decree.)
Just imagine going through customs in Paris, pulling out your phone, watching the customs official scan your vaccine passport and then waving you through. It’s going to feel almost as good as getting vaccinated in the first place, and painless to boot.
Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."