Vaccine passports: the key to the city?

Partners:

In August 2021, France introduced a compulsory ‘health pass’ – a euphemism for Covid passports – required to be shown by citizens before being allowed to have a drink in a bar or eat in a restaurant. Some have challenged the implications this might have for civil liberties. At the most basic level, the café culture scene that exemplifies Parisian life – that makes life enjoyable – will be denied to those people without official paperwork.

In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pushing ahead with plans for nightclubs and other venues to adopt Covid certification as a requirement for entry. In response, Greater Manchester’s night-time economy advisor claimed this ‘appears to have wiped out live gigs for a whole generation’. New York was the first city in America to demand vaccination passports for restaurants, gyms or indoor entertainments. The City that Never Sleeps, the original 24-hour city, will no longer be open to all. The epitome of cultural life – Broadway, Madison Square Gardens, Radio City, the Lincoln Centre – will refuse access to those without a medical certificate.

The consequences of vaccine passports extend further than the individual theatre, nightclub or bar – impacting the associated industries that feed them, causing devastating financial disruption across all areas of the economy. More importantly, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff suggest, the culture of Covid safetyism is in danger of eroding the sense that the city is a place of experimentation, risk and excitement. Instead, it has become a place of dread, with people locked away for fear of encountering other people. Some argue that health certificates are now seen as one mechanism to pronounce your legitimate status sufficient to enjoy the city.

Renowned urbanist Lewis Mumford described the city as a ‘theatre of social action’, meaning that the life of the city is much more than bricks and mortar: it was a ‘symbol of collective unity’. What greater symbol of collective disunity than a public declaration of one’s literal fitness, or conversely one’s moral illegitimacy, to participate in urban life? On the other hand, a YouGov poll published in August revealed that 60 per cent of Britons supported the introduction of vaccine passports sooner rather than later, including 30 per cent who ‘strongly’ support their implementation.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei once said that ‘a city is a place that can offer maximum freedom, otherwise it’s incomplete’. But if we have to live with Covid, do we have to give up some freedoms for the benefit of others? Isn’t healthy co-existence the very foundation stone of the metropolitan social contract? Might ID-cards, certificates and health restrictions create better, more socially-responsible citizens, or could it instead lead to a tense, two-tier city?