Why the cfr is evil

Authorities would lift restrictions on those who are presumed to have immunity, allowing them to return to work, to socialize and to travel. This idea has so many flaws that it is hard to know where to begin. On 24 April, the World Health Organization WHO cautioned against issuing immunity passports because their accuracy could not be guaranteed. Nonetheless, the idea is being floated in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and other nations.

China has already introduced virtual health checks, contact tracing and digital QR codes to limit the movement of people. Antibody test results could easily be integrated into this system. In our view, any documentation that limits individual freedoms on the basis of biology risks becoming a platform for restricting human rights, increasing discrimination and threatening — rather than protecting — public health. COVID immunity is a mystery. Current estimates, based on immune responses to closely related viruses such as those that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome MERS , suggest that recovered individuals could be protected from re-infection for one to two years.

Serological tests are unreliable. Tests to measure SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the blood can be a valuable tool to assess the prevalence and spread of the virus. But they vary widely in quality and efficacy. Low sensitivity means that the test requires a person to have a high concentration of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies for them to be measured effectively. This causes false negatives in people who have few antibodies, leading to potentially immune individuals being incorrectly labelled as not immune.

The volume of testing needed is unfeasible. Tens to hundreds of millions of serological tests would be needed for a national immunity certification programme. Two tests per person are the minimum, because anyone who tested negative might later become infected and would need to be retested to be immune certified. Repeat testing, on no less than an annual basis, would be necessary to ensure ongoing immunity. From June, the German government will receive 5 million serological tests a month from the Swiss firm Roche Pharmaceuticals — a leading supplier of one SARS-CoV-2 serological test that has been approved by regulators.

Even if immunity passports were limited to health-care workers, the number of tests required could still be unfeasible. The United States, for example, would need more than 16 million such tests. Even South Korea, a country with high testing rates, had managed to test only 1.

Too few survivors to boost the economy. The proportion of individuals known to have recovered from COVID varies widely in different populations. In New York state, for example, where 3, people were tested at random in grocery shops and other public locations, But these seem to be the exception.

Low disease prevalence combined with limited testing capacity, not to mention highly unreliable tests, means that only a small fraction of any population would be certified as free to work.

Based on current numbers of confirmed US cases, for example, only 0. Such percentages are inconsequential for the economy and for safety.

Monitoring erodes privacy. The whole point of immunity passports is to control movement. Thus, any strategy for immunity certification must include a system for identification and monitoring. Paper documentation could be vulnerable to forgery. Electronic documentation integrated into a smartphone app would be more resistant to fraud and more effective for contact tracing, retesting and updates of immune status. But electronic documents present a more serious risk to privacy 5.

Taiwan is also using smartphone apps with alert systems that are directly linked to police departments. The United Kingdom, United States and many other countries are testing various app options.

China has announced that elements of its QR-code tracking system are likely to remain in place after the pandemic ends. Marginalized groups will face more scrutiny. With increased monitoring comes increased policing, and with it higher risks of profiling and potential harms to racial, sexual, religious or other minority groups. During the pandemic, China has been accused of racially profiling residents by forcing all African nationals to be tested for the virus.

In other parts of the world, people from Asia have faced spikes in racialized prejudice. Before this pandemic, stop-and-frisk laws in the United States already disproportionately affected people of colour. And during the pandemic, policing continues to target people from minority groups. Between mid-March and the start of May in Brooklyn, New York, 35 of the 40 people arrested for violating physical distancing laws were black 6. Will antibody tests for the coronavirus really change everything?

These numbers are deeply concerning, but would be even more so if monitoring and policing for COVID immunity were to be used for ulterior motives. In the United States, where people of colour are racially segregated by neighbourhood and disproportionately incarcerated, digital incarceration could be used to monitor large segments of certain communities. The risk would be even higher if digital monitoring were to be linked to immigration status.

Unfair access. With a shortage of testing, many will not have access. Experience so far suggests that the wealthy and powerful are more likely to obtain a test than the poor and vulnerable. In tiered health-care systems, these inequities are felt even more acutely.

The very people who need to get back to work most urgently — workers who need to keep a roof over their head and food on the table — are likely to struggle to get an antibody test. Testing children before they return to school could be a low priority, as would testing retired older people and those who face physical, mental-health or cognitive challenges.

Societal stratification. Such labelling is particularly concerning in the absence of a free, universally available vaccine. If a vaccine becomes available, then people could choose to opt in and gain immune certification. Without one, stratification would depend on luck, money and personal circumstances. Restricting work, concerts, museums, religious services, restaurants, political polling sites and even health-care centres to COVID survivors would harm and disenfranchise a majority of the population.

How do children spread the coronavirus? Social and financial inequities would be amplified. Immunity passports could also fuel divisions between nations.

Individuals from countries that are unable or unwilling to implement immunity passport programmes could be barred from travelling to countries that stipulate them. Already people with HIV are subjected to restrictions on entering, living and working in countries with laws that impinge on the rights of those from sexual and gender minorities — such as Russia, Egypt and Singapore.

New forms of discrimination. Platforms for SARS-CoV-2 immune certification could easily be expanded to include other forms of personal health data, such as mental-health records and genetic-test results. The immunity passports of today could become the all-encompassing biological passports of tomorrow.

These would introduce a new risk for discrimination if employers, insurance companies, law-enforcement officers and others could access private health information for their own benefit. Such concerns have been catalogued over the past few years in debates about who should have access to genetic information, as demand rises from clinicians, researchers, insurers, employers and law enforcers, for example 7. Threats to public health. Immunity passports could create perverse incentives.

If access to certain social and economic liberties is given only to people who have recovered from COVID, then immunity passports could incentivize healthy, non-immune individuals to wilfully seek out infection — putting themselves and others at risk 8. A consistent pattern of performance or failure to perform also may be sufficient to establish the knowing or willful nature of the conduct, where such consistent pattern is neither the result of honest mistakes or mere inadvertency.

Conduct that is otherwise regarded as being knowing or willful is rendered neither accidental nor mitigated in character by the belief that the conduct is reasonable or legal. Lease means any contract, profit-share arrangement, joint venture or other agreement issued or approved by the United States under a mineral leasing law that authorizes exploration for, extraction of or removal of oil or gas.

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