What's That About Vaccine Passports?
So, there I was, enjoying what is essentially my first day off in, God, maybe nine days, when I spot this tweet from the simpering moron that is “Dr. Drew,” that preening celebrity rehab goof.
Guess what? International travel does require other vaccinations. Vaccine passports are basically a thing, since you’re technically supposed to have your record of vaccinations with you when you travel abroad.
Go to Africa or jungle climates and you’ll be getting a yellow fever shot, among others. Hepatitis, polio, rabies, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis – any or all of these may be required by nations you’re interested in visiting. In the Before Times, I never experienced any authorities checking my vaccination booklet, but I had it in my passport wallet wherever I went.
It never occured to me not to get vaccinated, so it wasn’t a reach.
Every time I came back to Canada with further plans abroad, I checked the vaccine requirements and booked appointments at the travel clinic to get vaccinated, if required for future destinations.
Dr. Drew is right about “vaccine passports segregate people” in that it keeps unvaccinated selfish twats from getting sick or jeopardizing others abroad. I’m down with that kind of segregation.
I strongly believe that whatever is out there to DETER people from travelling haphazardly is fantastic. If you can’t afford travel insurance, then I don’t care what kind of “deal” you got, you can’t AFFORD to travel. If you can’t AFFORD vaccinations, you can’t afford travel. Simple.
And if you think money doesn’t really matter, as long as you get there and live cheaply, then either you’re naive or ignorant, and shouldn’t be travelling.
What happens if your stuff is stolen? What happens if your medical insurance (if you’re intelligent enough to get it) doesn’t cover an emergency abroad, like mine didn’t cover my Albanian hysterectomy that cost 3,000 euros? What happens if, say, you’re in London like I was when it just happened to be the first day of the Extinction Rebellion that shut the entire city down and a cab costs you over $100, like mine did?
Things HAPPEN abroad — like getting stuck in riots, swindled with bad lodgings, and unexpected costs and emergencies abound too.
The trouble with cheap travel is, people go abroad that can’t really afford to travel, because they got a great deal. But the moment anything goes wrong, suddenly they’re looking for a bailout from friends or they’re launching a GoFundMe.
It’s irresponsible and naive, and it’s a real down side of cheap travel — it gets people out there who aren’t properly prepared, who don’t do their research for the trip because they saw a deal and jumped at it. And it includes planning ahead and ponying up for expensive vaccines that may require a booster shot in 6-8 weeks, but that’s hard to do when someone leaps at a last-second travel deal with disregard for taking pragmatic precautions, like getting vaccinated.
So maybe vaccines and vaccine passports make travel even more elusive. Well, that’s how it goes. For most of human history, people didn’t get to travel outside of their home countries.
Should everyone get to travel abroad one day? Absolutely. It’s incredibly impactful on who we are and the people we become.
But welcome to the real world where wishes aren’t horses and not everyone gets that lucky.
We are not entitled to see the world.
We are not entitled to enjoy time in other people’s nations.
It is a privilege and a blessing. We must defer to their society and their requirements. This has always been true. And never more so than now, in a pandemic.
International travel puts us in jeopardy precisely because contagious diseases exist and are always looking for ways to mutate and become better at what they do – kill you. That’s a virus’s only job: To mutate and find a way into you, to take hold, and to make you spread it too, so it can keep it thriving.
Some are very, very good at their jobs – like the new P1 variant of COVID-19 that has the government and well-informed people scared shitless here in British Columbia, where it’s taking hold and spreading at an exponential rate. Watching it in slow-motion in daily briefings is unnerving.
But beyond emerging viruses, there are historical threats that defy science and have no vaccines (but that’s beginning to change in some cases).
If, say, you travel abroad to a region with viruses that have been around so long that the locals have herd immunity, that herd immunity doesn’t apply to you. Meet the wrong person on the wrong day, and you may find yourself enjoying an exotic illness that, if you’re lucky, won’t debilitate or kill you.
And that’s stuff you can largely be vaccinated against. There are plenty of diseases, many spread by mosquitoes, for which there are no vaccinations. Dengue fever, which can kill you or, maybe like Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads, you may have a compromised immune system for the rest of your life. There’s malaria, Ebola, chikungunya, and other exotic diseases that cannot be vaccinated against too. Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance to play fast and loose with virology with those ones, despite getting vaccinated.
So, here we are with a vaccine available for this, and those pushing back against ‘vaccine passports’ are likely to think they don’t need vaccines. But ‘strength in numbers.’ We only get herd immunity when 80+ percent of people are jabbed.
Never mind the whole travel thing. Back here, in lockdown land, morons are protesting masks, let alone vaccines, and they jeopardize us all. They’re exactly the kind of selfish, ignorant people that allow for viruses to do their ONE JOB of continuing infections and spread.
And even here in North America, if businesses begin requiring proof of vaccines, I’ll be fine with that. No vaccination? No movie theatre for you. No jab? No sports event for you. No inoculation? No trip to Italy for you.
Prove you’re not a public health threat and thou shalt pass.
Is it a reach, privacy-wise? Yes.
But we have 7.8 billion people on this planet, rising daily. A century ago, it was 1.8 billion. We’re well overdue for a mass casualty event, and pandemics are incredibly effective at that. Hello, Black Death! (Lasting 7 years, the Black Death killed between 25% to 60% of the European population. I stayed in a town where the later Bubonic Plague pandemic reputedly killed 75% of the villagers. Imagine if 2 or 3 out of every 4 people you know died over a 5- to 7-year period, all from a pandemic. Imagine 5-7 years of living in terror. You think you have it bad now? Pfft, this is a cakewalk. And we have FaceTime.)
The more people the planet has, the greater the risk for a virus that evades containment and sweeps through our thickly-populated planet, becoming AMAZING at its job of killing people – like MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, another coronavirus, that kills 35.5% of the people it infects.
We have been so fortunate.
This pandemic could have been so much worse by this point, but science is amazing. The scientific community banded together to throw everything at this virus, and we’ve got tools now – vaccines, care protocols, re-thinking of community spaces – that have given us a fighting chance to get out of this alive. Literally.
But best you believe me — we got lucky. We figured this virus out fast and found out how to fight it and prevent spread, fast.
But now the world is fatigued, people are frustrated at the sacrifices we’ve paid for to stay safe. So many people see that we weren’t hit horribly hard by the pandemic, and they think that means it’s not so serious, and they’re tired of sheltering at home and forgoing Life As Normal.
And they’re who will mess this all up for us.
Here in British Columbia, the new Brazil variant is a disaster on the rise. It’s 2.6 times more infectious, it’s killing people aged 20-39. It’s reinfecting people who’ve already recovered.
How did it get here? By travel. Just like it’s gonna get everywhere else through travel. We’re a world on the move, and no matter how far back we pare travelling, it’s still a reality of modern life — shipping, skilled technicians, and all kinds of people need to travel for work.
Even if they quarantine, it’s risky.
See, the trouble with quarantines is, they need to pick an achievable number – a number of days cut off from the world that can be lived with, that won’t be too onerous for the economy or those stuck in isolation. So, they say “14 days.”
Most of the time, the virus is only asymptomatic for up to 14 days. But once every blue moon, someone might have a different genetic makeup. Maybe they incubate that virus longer. It happens. There was a guy in China, back in the Wuhan days, where, after thorough examination of his movements, experts agreed that he might have incubated the COVID-19 virus for 27 days before showing symptoms.
So, even when all the rules are followed, life – even the virus – finds a way.
We don’t yet know how Brazil’s devastating variant reached us. It’s safe to surmise that someone came to BC and either managed to avoid quarantine or was a super-incubator who managed to spread the disease after their textbook quarantine period.
It’s ultimately a case of “shit happens.”
Quarantine means the odds are AGAINST a post-14-day spread happening are small, but yes, “Life finds a way.”
I don’t have any wise words to make any of this easier. There are none, really.
All I know is, don’t play the odds. Follow protocols.
In a thread on a friend’s Facebook post, an Alberta mom talked about how they went out for their son’s birthday — the first time they did anything like that in months — and just two hours of “being normal” in a restaurant got 3 of the 5 family members sick.
We’re hearing more Canadian stories like this. All it takes is the wrong place at the wrong time.
The virus is invisible. It’s motivated. It’s airborne.
When we get through this – and we WILL – it will be because of science and civility.
In a fair world, only the ignorant and selfish would get infected, but alas, we’re all vulnerable. It’s like traveling abroad. You can be vigilant nearly constantly, but all it takes is an attentive attacker and a moment of your guard being down.
Like with that Albertan family. Opportunity meets vulnerability, and there you go.
This P1 virus is more infectious, more nefarious. Worse, it’s a moving goalpost as it continues mutating and defying us. Where this goes, nobody knows.
Please, Vaccinate
In a perfect world, we’d all travel and see other cultures where they live – we’d see the world and the world would see us, and without it costing a bundle or inconveniencing us much.
But we’re in a post-pandemic reality with a population expected to topple 10 billion worldwide by 2050, and the time for easy, casual travel is over. We must travel defensively, vaccinated; cognizant that we’re guests, and that the countries we’re visiting have every right to do everything they can to protect their population.
It doesn’t matter that you’re inconvenienced. That’s how public safety works.
So, please. Get vaccinated at your earliest opportunity. Encourage others. The sooner we achieve this, the sooner we can all hopefully cross a few more things off our “things to do before we die” wishlists.
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