The ACLU gives a thumbs down to coronavirus ‘immunity passports’
People who work in service sector jobs would be at a particular disadvantage if bosses started discriminating based on immunity status, says the ACLU.
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On the surface, it might sound good: Test Americans to find out who already had the novel coronavirus. Give those with protective antibodies an “immunity passport” allowing them to return to work safely.
But the American Civil Liberties Union — the nation’s largest civil rights group — isn’t so jazzed about the idea of providing people with documentation showing they’ve recovered from the disease.
Other countries are considering so-called immunity passports, and academics in the U.S. have tossed around the idea as a hypothetical way to start returning some of society to normal in a safe way.
But separating Americans into two groups, the COVID-positive and the COVID-negative, would disproportionally hurt people who work in the service sector, incentivize people to actively seek out acquiring the virus and seriously undermine individual rights to privacy, the American Civil Liberties Union argues in an analysis provided first to The Washington Post.
“As tempting as immunity passports may be for policymakers who want a quick fix to restart economic activity in the face of widespread suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, they present both public health and civil rights concerns that cannot be overlooked,” the ACLU’s Esha Bhandari and ReNika Moore wrote.
Confirmed COVID-19 cases are expected to tick upward as lockdowns are lifted across the nation. Yet virtually everyone is yearning for a taste of their pre-pandemic life that was so radically upended. Some political leaders — particularly President Donald Trump and his officials — say it’s time to start letting Americans return to work amid historic unemployment.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared yesterday that it’s safe to reopen because half of counties reporting “haven’t had a single death” and more than 60 percent of all COVID-19 cases are in just 2 percent of counties.
“We have got to get this economy and our people out and about working, going to school again, because there are serious health consequences to what we have been going through,” Azar said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
As the lockdowns are lifted, experts agree the key to preventing large-scale outbreaks lies in expanding testing and contact tracing. Antibody testing, where a person’s blood is examined for clues about whether they were already infected, is considered a key part of that effort because it offers valuable information about who can spread the virus and who can’t.
In theory, Americans with antibodies could be given more freedom to return to society because they’d be considered immune to the disease and unable to transmit it to others. Some policymakers think providing those who are immune with some kind of documentation to prove it would help people feel safer going back to work, school and other activities. Several other countries, including Chile, Germany and Great Britain, have seriously considered so-called immunity passports.
Its paper notes the science isn’t even clear on whether people who already had the coronavirus have developed enough antibodies to protect from future infections — or how long the immunity might last. Given how antibodies typically develop, it’s highly likely an infection will confer some level of protection, but it will be months before scientists are able to confirm that.
There are also outstanding questions about how accurate antibody tests are.
“Even small error rates could make reliance on antibody tests unworkable, or dangerous for those workers who get a false positive for antibodies,” Bhandari and Moore wrote.
Imagine a system where workers were divided into two classes — the immune and non-immune. Those in the non-immune class would be at a serious disadvantage if an immune worker were available to fill a position. Business owners trying to make their own workplaces as safe as possible would have every reason to give priority to those who already survived COVID-19.
Such a system would be applied more often to service-sector jobs in health care, caregiving, food production, emergency services, sanitation, transportation and delivery, which can’t be performed remotely like many white-collar roles, the ACLU notes. People who tend to work in these jobs — more often black and Latino Americans — would be at a particular disadvantage if bosses started discriminating based on immunity status.
To get a job, people might even seek to get infected by the coronavirus to gain immunity. And because minorities are more likely to have serious COVID-19 cases, that could result in more fatalities.
“It is foreseeable, maybe even inevitable, that an immunity passport system, with all its attendant pressures on workers to acquire immunity, would result in disproportionately more illness and death among people of color in the U.S.,” the ACLU paper says.
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