Immunity Passports and COVID-19

 Ethical issues

When talking about ethical issues, we are concerned with equality and non-discrimination, this is in particularly relevant when we talk about immunity passports, which ever definition we adopt which can be a passport provided based on the vaccination status or a passport that ius based on the covid 19 testing or antibody testing proven immunity.

So there’s 3 types of immunity passports you can get. We are just using it as an umbrella term hen talking about all of them. What they’re concerned with is the accessibility of vaccines and testing and especially due to countries where its not free. This is means getting these immunity passports or certificate is heavily dependant on your economic means. This heavily influenced also the freedom to move and travel and in come cases, even to get employed because preference was given to people who could acquire a certificate or any type of other type immunity passport. So they are really concerned with access to vaccine and testing and they were concerned with discrimination based on these documentation and one of them argue in priority of people who have an immunity passport when it comes to employment, but in some cases they said that priority certain classes such as key workers when it comes to immunity testing and vaccination was actually good thing to do an ethical thing to do.

They also talked about the accuracy of the test when it comes to covid19 and antibody testing and to what extent we could rely on them and they went to discussed which provisions of the GDPR applied in this particular case. As I said, in this particular situation we don’t have a question whether this is personal data because its not anonymised and we also don’t have a question of sensitive personal data because itrelates to our health status, so article 9 of the gdpr applies and they provided other relevant articles:

They made a full examination of every provision of the gdpr that applies to these specific type of data, with a reflection also to right to privacy:

What they spent a lot of time looking at is what remained unsolved or unresolved after the pandemic, because the question was not only what was done but what was done badly and what we can do better.

  • So one thing they specifically focused on are sunset clauses, provisions which provide an expiration date for legislation or particular intervention which is often used whenever we deal with the limitation of human rights, in this particular case we have a right to privacy, to some extent was threatened.
  • They discussed different ways we can deal with this in the future. The biggest concern was whether everything should stay on the legislative body, or should we have specialised body for health crisis situation that would deal much more efficiently and better knowledge for what should be done and how long it should last.

Another issue they looked at is function creep when we collect the data based on the vaccination status or testing status, and as I said, these were not anonymised so they were stored and available. One interesting issue they identified is the possible to use this data in future voting, especially to identify.. because vaccine was a very controversial issue in the public and so based on our data, whether we are vaccinated or not, we can actually profile the public when it comes to future voting system. This is function creep because the data was not collected for that purpose but it can be repurposed and used by public officials, so they identified that one potential function creep.

They talked about discrimination, as I said they talked about discrimination based on class and economic means when it comes to access to health system, but they also talked about international relationship between different countries and how certain parts of the world were discriminated in terms of access to vaccines and to testing.

There was a lot of questions around that; to what extent can this be dealt with locally, if we have a global pandemic, do we need an international treaty that can deal with this in the future, something that relate to the international data transfer issues we discussed last time. Because in this time of sitation we need international coorprination more than ever, and transfer of data and exchange of data can help us resolve the health problem.

Also, they talked about Fairness. This argument is vague and touches upon the equality and discrimination and its also connected with the possible discrimination in work force and so on, this is just another way of talking about discrimination.

Finally, they dealt with social pressure, what they found to be one of the issue we need to think about in advance, they were very concerned with due to global pandemic and the panic that was caused by the society, they were identified people were more eager to join on a train overnight because of the general panic that was caused. They saw this as a big problem for lawyers, health workers, legislators and so on, especially because they noticed abacuses we are much more keen on committing to surrender our individual freedom then we would be in normal times

  • So this was a call for going back to consciousness and prepare better in the future and not react in panic because they thought many decisions by the government and society were the reflection of this general global panic, they also saw this as an unsolved issue and if we leave it the same for the future, we might have the same results/situation.

When it comes to legal issues, they then dealth with legal issues in more detailed. They were discussing which issues need to be solves, function creep, discriminatory practices and social inequality and how that should be done? – hopefully through the gdpr and the alternative we have in the UK. They emphasised the importance of raising awareness of the function creep, something we talked about. Data minimisation – so we don’t collect anything beyond that is necessary for a particular function. And transparency – requirement in order for society understand what they are consenting to

They tried to resolve issue of discrimination and inequality. The general take was we need international corporation now more than ever, in order to create guidance for the next health related crisis or next pandemic

They did not find solution of discrimination and inequality at a local level, but they call for the international body full of experts who would deal with this if this arise as an issue in the future.

  • They confirm in some situation there is a warrant for some classes like key workers to be prioritised like what happened in the UK but the other types of discrimination and inequality that are not actually justify would better be resolved at the international level

Question:

  • Do you see any difference in which type of immunity passports we apply? Meaning do you see any difference between testing for covid, testing for antibodies and confirmation on vaccine. Do you think all these data should be treated in the same way?
  • Which is more invasive? Vaccination status is. Because others have an expiration date
  • Based on the ethical questions mentioned, To what extent did gdpr has address this during the covid pandemic?