Thread by @jburnmurdoch

Brief thread on vaccine passports and combatting hesitancy:

There’s been lots of chatter lately about vaccine passports. I get why lots of people think they’re a good idea, but one thing in particular strikes me as a big problem:

The stark racial divide in vaccine hesitancy.

Knowing what we do about rates of hesitancy (and measured vaccination rates 👇) among different ethnic groups, vaccine passports would amount to telling lots of non-white people "sorry you can’t come in here".

I don’t know about you, but that feels ... not good.

This is not to condone vaccine hesitancy, or to condescend and say "well it’s okay for them, considering everything".

Obviously we need to continue combatting vax hesitancy wherever we find it, *especially* among ethnic minorities among whom infection risk is also higher

But it’s not good enough to say "Well it’s up to them, they just need to educate themselves, then they get a passport."

As we’re finding with more and more cases of mistaken beliefs, you don’t solve this by punishing people, nor by just brute-force "educating them" out of it.

In many cases, people in these groups are being fed huge amounts of misinformation.

Combatting that is about carefully rebuilding trust so as to solve both this any other related problems. Not just saying "get the jab or you’re not coming in".

So let’s keep doing everything we can to ensure as many people as possible get vaccinated, but let’s be smart about how we do that.

If we’re following the science on vaccines, let’s also follow the science on how to change minds.