Vax Passports: The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan told us how everyday objects convey messages and condition our view of the world. What does the "Covid certificate" say about us and our attitudes?

Back to normal. It’s what we all want. But look around. Is anything about our Covid-infested world looking anything close to approaching normal? The city as a landscape of checkpoints, like an urban airport where we must flash a “passport” to clear door after door, is not the normal environment we once knew. But it’s one we are prepared to accept. Nations of people divided and pitted into conflict based on the medical treatments they have been willing — or pressured, or refused — to accept. This is our only choice, right?

“Covid passports,” “freedom passports,” or more neutrally, “vaccine certificates” — they leave a bad taste in my mouth. Some say they are authoritarian, a breach of civil liberties, a slippery slope. I tend to think we’re already far down the slope, the authoritarian aspects more subtle and sinister than typical totalitarian systems, and the civil liberties angle — well, that’s for lawyers and courts to sort out.

Where I want to argue from is rooted in Marshal McLuhan’s media theory. Don’t worry, I’m not about to get too academic on you. McLuhan, for those who aren’t familiar, was quite an entertaining figure. So while I’m being serious here, I hope to provide an imaginative window that allows those who disagree with me to see the landscape from the vantage point of a vaccinated leftist who encourages a truly liberal understanding of the illiberalism that has infected us.

“The medium is the message.” The phrase might sound familiar. The expression emerged from 1960s pop culture, pulled from Marshal McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media. McLuhan was a professor of media studies, though he was more of a philosopher and treated as a pop icon in the counterculture movement. He discussed how the content of a medium is often overwhelmed by the medium itself.

Think of a person reading The New York Times on their phone. We are prone to think of this not as reading, but “staring at a phone” and then think dismissively of the behavior. “Geez, we’re all addicted to our devices!” A person reading the same content from a physical newspaper would be viewed as intelligent and well informed, not a “newspaper addict.”

The medium conveys a message about the reader of the content, regardless of whether the message is true. But the medium then changes the reader’s behavior as well. While reading the newspaper on our phones, we are distracted by texts, a video that someone just shared, or perhaps we flip over to Twitter out of boredom. McLuhan predicted this “convergence of media” but did not live long enough to see his ideas manifest in the internet age.

McLuhan discussed how everyday objects — anything, really — could act as potential media that convey messages and affect behavior. A medium could be a lightbulb that changes the way we think about a room’s potential, or a garden in front of a house. The garden’s content is flowers, but its message is, “Respectable people live here.”

We have seen how the message of a surgical face mask has changed in the pandemic. Before Covid, such a mask said, “I work in the medical profession.” Today, it can say multiple other things. When the CDC declared in May that it was no longer necessary for fully vaccinated people to wear masks, Rachel Maddow, who hosts one of the world’s most popular TV news programs, spoke for many when she said she found it hard to imagine seeing an unmasked person and not think of them as a “threat” or a “Covid denier.” (This was before the CDC went back on this advice in light of variants.) Maddow also said that she could not imagine going into a store without a mask, because it still felt risky, despite being fully vaccinated. To her and millions of others, masks carried personal or political messages: “I am safe” or “I am not a right-wing Covid denier.”

When it comes to the cards we carry in our wallets, think about the messages they contain. A business traveler slaps a “platinum” credit card on the airport check-in counter, and the message of the card is, “I’m an important person,” or “I have wealth.” The owner of the card will often get preferential treatment, even though the content of the card is simply a grouping of numbers and letters that allow the person to be billed for goods.

Your driver’s license also has content, but it’s much less likely to elicit feelings of pride and privilege when you show it to a server at a bar, or a police officer at roadside checkpoint. Not all cards in your wallet have the potential for weighty messages.

Many argue that vaccine certificates are just like a driver’s license — proof that you are “safe” and “eligible” to be in a designated place, the same way you are “safe” to drive a car or “eligible” to drink alcohol. Before comparing Covid certificates to any other card in your wallet (or on your phone), it’s worth examining the “messages of the medium” itself.

The vaccine certificate has content. It says, “I am vaccinated against Covid.” As you read this essay, try to consider the messages of this medium. I will lay out my own interpretations toward the end.

TURNING THE PUBLIC INTO ENFORCERS

If anything, a year ago felt more normal than now. Lockdowns certainly weren’t normal, but they felt (to me) like a normal response to a pandemic that was more deadly than the modern world has experienced.

Vaccines were supposed to be the ticket back to normal. They could have been. They are widely enough available in countries implementing “passport” systems that anyone who wants one can get one. We could just be opening everything up and telling the unvaccinated, “You’re on your own.” That might sound cruel to those who can’t get vaccinated because of medical issues, but they won’t get a “freedom card” anyway — and if they do, that’s a technicality a virus won’t recognize.

So we are going in the opposite direction. Carrying a card that displays our vaccination status to sit in Starbucks is not normal. Necessary? Make that argument if you must. But admit that it’s not the way things used to be.

My objection to vaccine certificates lies less in the abstract civil liberties legalities — though I do have concerns in that arena. My objection is in the way the existence of such a card can turn every vaccinated person, including myself, into a participant in a social-control program — an experiment, really — that overlaps with class issues and turns us all into enforcers against a group of people we fear and stigmatize. The card is reshaping our attitudes toward society, and controlling our own behaviors and attitudes as much as it does for the unvaccinated.

You could take the case of the Denny’s waitress. She will have to ask everyone for their vaccination cards before taking their orders. But then a group of three or four unvaccinated people seat themselves and demand service. Whether or not you think they are assholes or legitimate protesters isn’t the point. We know such people are going to do such a thing. Which puts the waitress in the position of asking these people to leave, of denying them service, of in effect being an enforcer of a rule that is sort of a law but not quite, one that we have never before been familiar with. Bars and nightclubs have musclehead bouncers who are specifically trained to deal with problems that occur during ID checks. This shouldn’t be the domain of every shop clerk on Main Street.

But what about for us, the average law-abiding customer. What will you do if you witness a situation, say, where a customer seated near you can’t show their QR code because their battery died, or they left their phone in the car, and the waiter says, “It’s okay. I know you. Let me tell you today’s specials.” Do you complain to management? Call 911? You have a decision to make — will you rat this person out? Perhaps get someone in trouble or fired? And if it’s your phone that was misplaced and you’re denied service — now it’s your freedom lost on a technicality, or perhaps you’re the one who breaks the rules and is served in secret.

We are numb to these changes in society’s dynamics. Little are we aware that we are creating new points of conflict in order to coerce people into receiving a particular medical treatment. Even if you think this program is necessary, it is essential that we not deny this shift in both medical ethics and societal norms.

What about just creating a legal mandate for vaccinations with real threat of punishment by the state? We have done it before with diseases such as polio and smallpox. (I address that in the next section.) Whether the same should be done for Covid, forcing every citizen by law to be vaccinated — I wouldn’t argue for such a thing, but at least it would leave the general public out of the role of enforcement. Those opposed to the program would direct their anger to their local government representatives, who would then argue the matter in parliament on our behalf. We would then see how ugly such a legal mandate for all would be, and the attempt would fail.

The vaccine certificate program allows us a technicality to argue that no legal rights are being violated (the unvaccinated can remain so if they wish), while doling out social punishments to people who are not breaking any law. It also allows us to do this without any debate in a civil forum — no town hall, no national congress, no legislature, no parliament.

Some say that vaccine certificates are authoritarian. That’s ridiculous, right? Aren’t legally mandated vaccinations more authoritarian? Actually, when society is the one left enforcing the rules, it makes us the authoritarians. Many will love playing that role, calling the cops on their neighbor who they know is unvaccinated and who they’ve just seen in the laundromat. Or the coffee shop manager who gets into a verbal and nearly physical confrontation with his competitor, who is opposed to the program and is letting the unvaccinated inside. You might not be one of those people; you might just turn a blind eye in such scenarios. But by carrying and using the card, you and I legitimize its use and give power to those who rat on their neighbors, customers, co-workers, and others in their community.

SCIENCE DOESN’T SUPPORT VACCINE CERTIFICATES

“The unvaccinated are going to spread ever more dangerous Covid mutations! If these people were around 50 or 100 years ago, we’d still have polio and smallpox!” That’s one of the arguments in favor of the certificates.

We all know that polio, smallpox, and measles are vastly different from Covid. They are stable viruses that don’t mutate and only require a one-time vaccination. Those vaccines were also not politicized, which, surprise surprise, helps build public trust. Thus, those diseases could be easily eradicated or severely diminished by vaccine mandates.

Covid, on the other hand, mutates around the vaccines, and the vaccines we have are “leaky.” This means that those vaccinated can still carry and spread the virus without getting sick themselves. We are more of a threat to the unvaccinated, but certainly we’re not using the certificates to protect them, right? The best we can hope for is that Covid mutates into something less pathogenic, which would be the natural evolutionary path of a coronavirus.

But then there’s the well-cited Marek’s disease chicken experiment, which showed that using a leaky vaccine on a large population in the midst of a pandemic can produce stronger versions of the virus. This presents a conundrum. I don’t want to be an “unvaccinated chicken” in this situation, but it’s possible that we the vaccinated could end up becoming the source of stronger mutations.

Nobody can say with certainty whether the chicken experiment results will be duplicated with humans and Covid vaccines. We are in uncharted waters in this regard, but the science isn’t pointing in an optimistic direction, and it is foolish to state with so much confidence that the unvaccinated are going to be the ones creating deadlier mutations. There is just too much we don’t know about how this disease is evolving and interacting with our vaccines.

Because state-mandated vaccinations are unsupportable, we have instead created this unprecedented system that punishes a disliked segment of the population via community rejection, under the pretense of doing our bit to eradicate a virus that we know will never go away.

There is an ostensible “public health” case for keeping the unvaccinated out of public spaces so that they don’t spread the virus, but it falls apart upon simple examination. The vaccines are highly effective. If the virus breaks through, symptoms are mild or non-existent, and hospitalizations are extremely rare. This should negate any fear about being around unvaccinated people. Average vaccination rates in most Western countries hovers around 75% at time of writing. Subtracting the 15% under 12 years old, who are not subject to vaccinations, that’s 85% or more of adult populations who have received at least one shot of the vaccine (and will no doubt go back for their second). With an unregulated reopening of society, the number of unvaccinated people sitting around you at brunch would be small, and again, are less threat to the vaccinated than the other way around.

The real reason for these cards is actually to punish the unvaccinated and limit their freedoms until they “do the right thing,” knowing full well that a significant number of them won’t budge. This becomes a perverse psychological payoff that is conscious in many, unconscious in some, non-existent in others, but supported by all who abide by the system without comment.

The joy in these vaccination cards lies precisely in the knowledge that they won’t move the needle for the firmly entrenched “anti-vaxers.” The unvaccinated need to exist in some number for the public authoritarians who need someone to feel superior to. They don’t want those “dirty, loathsome, Fox News-viewing creatures” sitting next to them at brunch. Vaccine enthusiasts moralize against the “anti-vaxers” and politicize the issue to such an extent that both the vaccinated and the hesitant view vaccines as cultural signifiers as much as medical treatments. This entrenches psychological aversion within the unvaccinated, because nobody likes being bullied into doing something.

A thorough study bluntly titled Vaccine Passports May Backfire from August 2021 addressed this phenomenon. Out of 1,358 participants in the UK and Israel, the conclusions of the researchers were that Covid certificate policies had negative effects on willingness to get vaccinated in certain segments of society, and that vaccine uptake for these people would increase “by supporting individuals’ autonomous motivation to get vaccinated and using messages of autonomy and relatedness, rather than applying pressure and external controls.”

Another study from July 2021 suggested that we’re getting vaccine hesitant people all wrong. While we disparagingly assume them to be uneducated and from the lower depths of society, the researchers concluded: “The largest decrease in hesitancy between January and May by education group was in those with a high school education or less. Hesitancy held constant in the most educated group (those with a PhD); by May PhD’s were the most hesitant group.”

I recall all the times I got a flu shot, and the many years I didn’t. I should have gotten one every year, but quite often I wasn’t prepared for the sickish feeling the next day, or I was lazy. When I did get the shot, it was because I was in my doctor’s office for something unrelated, or a kindly nurse in a workplace clinic convinced me of the benefits to myself and society at large. If I had seen a poster from a public health authority insulting my intelligence (see below) while a chorus of vaccine enthusiasts on TV and social media called me a science denier, an anti-vaxer, or such, I never would have received a single flu shot in my life — even though I do believe the earth is round. [continued below]

If the goal is to motivate the public toward participation in this type of health campaign, the people we should be following are behavioral scientists, psychologists, and medical ethicists — the very people we are not seeing on TV news programs. I saw epidemiologist Michael Osterholm recently in a viral clip touting the benefits of the “Covid passport.” He views it as an innocent “carrot and stick” tool. I respect Osterholm and pay attention when he speaks, but on this issue, virologists and epidemiologists are laypeople who are not giving expert advice — they are not sociologists. (Osterholm also said in the same PBS interview that masks only give people a few minutes of safety in an enclosed environment and don’t provide a significant benefit. Interestingly, that’s not the part of his interview that went viral.)

SOCIAL COSTS: WORTH THE BENEFITS?

When considering whether to open up without restrictions or to use the vaccine certificate, we have not thought about whether one plan will actually increase vaccination rates more than the other. We are simply caving to our primal desire to dole out justice to someone for the suffering we have endured through multiple lockdowns and ever-shifting advice from the experts.

We also have not done a mental cost-benefit analysis of going down this road. Our aim, at its best, is to reduce burdens on our hospital ER systems. But the point is moot if the vaccine card system doesn’t result in a measurable increase in vaccination rates. In the province of Quebec, the “freedom passport” (as they call it) does not seem to have raised the rate of vaccinations in any significant way since the card was floated on July 8, confirmed in August, and implemented on Sep 1. (66% June 6; 71.5% July 6; 73.7% Aug 6; 76.3% Sep 6.) The graphs look similar for Ontario and BC before and after their card programs were announced. (The graphs were viewed here and here on Sep 8/2021. Update on Sep 19; Quebec is now at 77.9%. It’s nice that the number ticks upward, but the rate hasn’t become faster. Across Canada, the same rate of about 3% per month since June is holding, after most provinces introduced the system.)

Even giving the benefit of the doubt, if vaccination rates would have stagnated without the program, the difference would only be 1 to 3 percent. For this difference, we are willing to sacrifice “normal” and burden our communities with enormous social costs. Outlining all the ways in which society gets chipped away could fill pages, but here is one example:

A manager has a well-liked employee who has been a productive asset to her company. The employee had Covid and has recovered. He trusts the science that says he now carries stronger immunity than a vaccine can provide, and does not want to take a vaccine for whatever reason. Even if you don’t have sympathy for the employee, what about sympathy for the manager? She is now in the position of having to fire a good worker who has become like family on her staff. Maybe she agrees with the employee, but HR has their rules and she has to let him go. Or maybe she disagrees with the employee and they have a massive fight before she terminates him. If I were the manager in that situation, I would resent the stress, conflict, distraction from productivity, loss of an asset, and need for re-staffing and training.

Then there are the protests. The large peaceful ones in Europe tend to go lightly reported, while the violent and idiotic ones bring out the TV crews. Peaceful or not, these are divisions that we have provoked for that extra zero-to-three percent in vaccine coverage, which we likely would have gotten anyway with an unrestricted opening. The cost-benefit analysis just doesn’t show much worth to our societies.

VACCINE CARDS: A DISTRACTION FROM STRUCTURAL CHANGE

Before closing this essay, I want to return to Marshall McLuhan’s observation: “The medium is the message.” What are the messages we convey when we show our magic QR code or certificate to get into a restaurant? The certificate’s content says, “I am vaccinated against Covid.” The certificate’s messages are implied at large throughout the culture:

• I am not an anti-vaxer.

• I’m a liberal.

• I believe in science.

• I am not a threat.

• I am a good person.

• I am one of the more intelligent members of society.

• I am not a conservative or libertarian.

• I am doing my part to help society.

• I am not one of those ignoramuses who watch Fox News and put supposed ‘liberties’ before public health.

• I am not politically or culturally affiliated with those awful people.

It doesn’t matter if you think the “messages” are good or bad, whether you think they apply to you or not. What matters is that for society at large, some of these messages exist, and they interfere with an objective effort to protect public health. We are going to cling to “vax passports” for reasons that are unconsciously emotional, personal, and political.

McLuhan describes the content of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly. (Wikipedia)

To this end, we are focused on the content of the Covid certificates without being aware of the “structural changes in our affairs” that follow with them. We turn vaccines into a socio-political signifier, along with insults and condescension, holding a match under the tinder of a segment of society that is growing increasingly angry.

We have never in modern times engaged in a social experiment by which the majority of society takes away liberties from their neighbors and promises to give them back as a reward. Whereby we carry a card that is meant to cause shame and coercion by its lack of possession by another group. We don’t use our driver’s licenses to coerce other people to drive. It is unlike any other card we have been asked to put in our wallets — or on our phones, or wherever.

The state is not the enforcer of this program — we are, and it fundamentally changes our perceptions of society and our roles in it.

We have no measures by which we would terminate the vaccine certificate program. If we find our hospitals relatively quiet on the Covid front and we have, say, a 90% vaccination rate, do we say “Enough”?

My own fear is no longer about the virus — I’m vaccinated, after all, and I’m confident that even better vaccines are coming. My much larger fear is that our anger and primal desire for justice will keep measures in place to ensure that punishment can continue to be doled out.

Denmark has discontinued their vaccine certificates based on an 80% vaccination rate among the over-12 population while many Canadian provinces with better rates than Denmark’s are just starting their “freedom card” programs. In the US, one university campus with a 99% vaccination rate has turned into a college-age Lord of the Flies as dorm residents endure ongoing lockdowns in hostage-like situations, where many students have become self-appointed enforcers who snitch and initiate conflict with rule-breakers. Stories like these are becoming evermore common. Something else is going on here. It’s not just about getting vaccination rates up.

Vaccines were implicitly promised as a road “back to normal.” We have had them for several months now, but instead our society is looking increasingly dystopian. Every step of the way, we have made compromises to defeat Covid. The disease is still with us, but the compromises keep piling up and we drift further from “normal.” We are so far out to sea that we have forgotten what the shore looks like.