Certifying Health: The Unequal Legal Geographies of COVID-19 Certificates

Abstract

This article discusses some of the challenges posed by the introduction of COVID-19 certificates as a privileged tool for opening up mobility and access in order to restore a semblance of normality to social life. While at present there is no international consensus either on how – or why – such certificates should be used or on how they should be designed and applied, a growing number of countries have already introduced COVID-19 certificates in one form or another. Yet the scientific community as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have expressed caution, noting that such certificates might disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, while the new COVID-19 certificates may appear to promise a magical solution enabling us to free up global mobility and reopen economies, they actually risk creating new borders and new forms of inequality through an exclusionary sorting and profiling mechanism that delimits “safe” from “unsafe” bodies, based on differential access to “immuno-privilege” – but also differential forms of “bio-securitisation”. They also provide an illusion of pandemic safety – assuring citizens that through the “fetish” of the certificate “safe travel” can magically be reinstated. Securing territories and populations has always been, in Foucauldian terms, a matter of “making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”. We can therefore reasonably expect growing contestation, including before courts, around COVID-19 certificates in their different national and international iterations, as their inherently discriminatory nature and other unintended consequences such as those stemming from the use of persuasive – as opposed to the more traditional coercive – governmental power begin to unfold in their performative trajectory.

Vaccine Hesitancy and the Green Digital Pass: A Study on Adherence to the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign

“…The COVID-19 certificate is to “facilitate safe free movement” in Europe, and it represents a tool for the regulation and governance of the pandemic, as well as for the wider governance and regulation of populations and territories, including the regulation of access to fundamental human rights [ 18 ].…”

How is “solidarity” understood in discussions about contact tracing apps? An overview

“…If solidarity is understood as a factual form of social cohesion of a society, it can either refer to a specific, individual nation such as Singapore (66), Ireland (67), France (68), Germany (69,70), South Korea (68), the UK (71, 72), and China (70) or even the European Union (73), or to an unspecified, individual nation (74)(75)(76)(77)(78)(79). It can furthermore be an indeterminate collective of unknown size (36,(80)(81)(82)(83)(84)(85)(86)(87), a particular marginalized group of persons within an indeterminate collective (38,(88)(89)(90)(91), or an indeterminate human-technology-society called "post-digital hybrid assemblage" (92).…”

“…On the one hand, the public acceptance and individual use of CTA may strengthen the factual forms of social cohesion that exist in a collective (67) or strengthen factors that are elementary for them (72,82), it may prevent negative consequences for forms of social cohesion that would have happened if CTA were not accepted and used (66), or open up possibilities for reimagining old and establishing new relationships (92). On the other hand, the acceptance and use of CTA may also have a negative impact on a society's forms of social cohesion: by threatening or undermining the forms of social cohesion that exist in a collective (83), by weakening factors that are elementary for them (75,77,(80)(81)(82)86), by reinforcing existing discriminations and worsening the situation for specific groups of people (38,75,90,91), or by using resources for the development and implementation of CTA that would have had more positive effects on the community if used in an alternative way (88,89).…”

Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism

“…Public health and its knowledge mechanisms are not exclusively and neutrally biological as health is the embodied outcome of specific political choices (King, 2017), as well as of wider (and often unequal) infrastructures and socio-technical systems (Baumann and Yacobi, 2022). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought forcefully to the fore the tight connections between public health and geopolitics (Cole and Dodds, 2021; Diaz and Mountz, 2020), via the virus’ implications for questions of sovereignty at multiple scales (Bialasiewicz and Eckes, 2021), border management (Fall, 2020; Sturm et al, 2021) and global inequalities (Alemanno and Bialasiewicz, 2021; Sparke and Williams, 2022). The coupling of health and geopolitics is not new: health has been increasingly on the agenda of the UN Security Council and the G20 within the framework of global health that emerged as part of rising security paradigms following the 9–11 attacks (Ingram, 2005).…”