Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) on Saturday proposed requiring digital COVID-19 vaccine certificates from residents when entering certain venues such as schools and other “vulnerable spaces.” The mayors said they would consult with experts before deciding whether to require the certificates at other venues such as shops and restaurants.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) later said that local governments are free to use such certificates, as long as they protect personal information, adding that a separate digital certificate has been developed by the central government for international travel.
Other countries have been using digital vaccine certificates to counteract vaccine hesitancy, but it is unclear why such certificates would be needed in Taiwan, where vaccine hesitancy is relatively low. On the contrary, the nation had the opposite problem early during the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for vaccines far outstripped supply and the nation had to rely largely on vaccine donations by private entities and foreign governments. Vaccine supply in Taiwan has since grown significantly, and the second-dose vaccination rate has reached 72 percent, with millions eligible for booster shots.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Nov. 24 last year said: “Data suggests that before the arrival of the Delta variant [of SARS-CoV-2], vaccines reduced transmission by about 60 percent. With Delta, that has dropped to about 40 percent.”
That suggests that being vaccinated provides some measure of protection against spreading COVID-19 to others. Local governments’ motivation in asking for proof of vaccination when entering certain venues can therefore be understood, but any such certificate should be issued by the central government under the guidance of the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), and should take into account the opinions of lawmakers and the public.
This is especially the case as “the WHO has long stressed that the currently available COVID-19 vaccines are primarily aimed at reducing the risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death, rather than transmission,” Agence France-Presse has reported.
Arguments exist both for and against vaccine passports. In an opinion piece published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp on Aug. 1 last year, University of Manitoba professor Arthur Schafer, who serves on the Canadian government’s vaccine passport panel, said there are “few good arguments” against the use of such passports.
One major argument against them has been that they represent a privacy concern, “but the actual loss of privacy involved in presenting a QR code to confirm your vaccination status for admission to a restaurant or gym or concert seems inconsequential,” he said.
An opinion piece published by The New Statesman on Dec. 16 said that there “is only a small minority who are holding out” against vaccines, and that “attempting to compel this minority to submit to vaccination [through the use of a vaccine passport] is unlikely to work.”
Implementation of a vaccine passport in Taiwan is unlikely to cause protests on the scale of those that have taken place in the US and Europe, but the issue is arguably more about sloppy execution. If each municipality comes up with its own digital passport and rules, then Taiwanese would need multiple certificates to travel around the country and would be unsure which to use in each city.
The current nationwide system of temperature checks and scanning QR codes when entering venues has worked well. If vaccine certificates are to be required, a nationwide system, designed by the CECC, should be used.
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