So after all this talk of how we're better than China and how invasive the wechat Green qr code is we decided to copy it?
What exactly is the moral high ground we stand on?
What exactly is the moral high ground we stand on?
Most countries, for example, require vaccination for contagious diseases for a variety of public functions like attending school. The need to validate vaccination status for functions like boarding airplanes or attending large stadium events is just common sense, as certain populations are refusing vaccination for mostly irrational reasons.
These digital credentials allow people to conveniently provide this documentation in a reliable way.
It's not irrational for people to be cautious about a new treatment for which there's absolutely no data about long-term safety (can't know the 2-3 year effects of something that's only been around one year), which has bypassed normal treatment approval processes (the covid vaccines only have FDA emergency use authorisation, and have not yet passed the requirements for full FDA approval, requirements which are strict for a reason), for which some previous attempts have failed significantly (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536382/), to prevent a disease that for many people has less than a 1/100,000 to 1/1,000,000 fatality rate (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.17.20097410v...), ten to a hundred times less dangerous than giving birth.
And you're seriously downplaying the risks of COVID-19 here, of course it is relatively harmless for very young people. But it is seriously dangerous for a large part of the population that is older.
It's not only "very young" people. Did you look at the link I provided? For people 20-30, it's around one in a hundred thousand. For people 30-50, it's around one in ten thousand (similar to giving birth). When someone's making a rational decision, it's with regard to their individual risk; the risk of covid to an eighty-year-old is irrelevant to a twenty-year-old deciding whether to take the vaccine, especially given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government: https://covid.viz.sg/ ).
>for vaccines they generally appear reasonably close to the date of the vaccination.
The MRNA vaccines are quite different from normal dead/live virus vaccines and have never been used at scale.
Their closer relative, the viral vector vaccines (like J&J’s), have been. You’re right about calculating risk, but when’s the last time a vaccine in normal, longer term stage three trials resulted in a higher fatality rate than COVID (for any age group)? The link for the SARS vaccine candidate was a failure that was caught in a mouse model, which unsurprisingly they also did with the new vaccines before the human trials started. To echo the parent comment, these were immediate side effects on challenge (which would likely been caught in stage 2 trials even if they only happened in humans and not in animal models).
If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest.
> given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government
That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines).
It's basically like saying: "the unit tests have all passed now, the regression tests all pass, so let's roll out the fix straight to prod, because it's urgent and we don't have enough time to do the normal amount of staging environment testing". Sure, probably it's fine. But mistakes happen. In any other context, a 1/100,000 chance of error would be considered incredibly low, a great achievement. But in this case, a 1/100,000 chance of seeing after 2-3 years a failure like happened early on in those previous trials would be an incredible tragedy, if the vaccine was taken by people with less than 1/100,000 chance of being killed by covid.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 makes a better case than I can that "a finite, non-theoretical risk is evident in the medical literature that vaccine candidates composed of the SARS-CoV-2 viral spike and eliciting anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, be they neutralising or not, place vaccinees at higher risk for more severe COVID-19 disease when they encounter circulating viruses"
>If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest.
The difference is that covid does not have a big qualitative difference from other respiratory viruses, and no circulating respiratory viruses are known to cause serious long-term symptoms in people who were short-term asymptomatic. Whereas the MRNA treatment is quite a different mechanism from previous vaccines.
Separately, ethically it's generally considered worse if a death results from deliberate human action than from an "act of nature". E.g. nowhere is it morally acceptable to murder somebody just because their organs could be used to save ten people. In this case that means it would be considered morally worse if people were coerced into taking a vaccine that ended up killing them than if, absent the vaccine, they died from natural causes of equivalent risk.
>That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines).
There's one super-spreader there, a prison cook. I pulled the data from the backing rest API (if you want I could upload the notebook and show you):
pd.Series(vax_links).describe()
count 17.000000
mean 2.705882
std 3.670230
min 1.000000
25% 1.000000
50% 1.000000
75% 2.000000
max 14.000000
dtype: float64
pd.Series(unvax_links).describe()
count 127.000000
mean 2.181102
std 1.965647
min 1.000000
25% 1.000000
50% 2.000000
75% 2.000000
max 15.000000
dtype: float64
So yes, chances are I wouldn't die if I didn't vaccinate, but chances are I would kill my grandma if I caught covid.
The choice isn't between the vaccine or COVID.
FDA approvals are largely based on the ability to provide reliable test cases. You literally have the largest test case known to human history. No amount additional FDA testing is going to make that change.
> to prevent a disease that for many people has less than a 1/100,000 to 1/1,000,000 fatality rate
This figure is meaningless. We have a steady history of "excess deaths" and can predict what annual death rates are on average on a yearly basis. This number jumped significantly even with mask mandates, lockdowns, etc over the last 18 months:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Nine women can't have a baby in one month. A billion test cases for short-term side effects still aren't test cases for long-term side effects.
>This figure is meaningless. We have a steady history of "excess deaths" and can predict what annual death rates are on average on a yearly basis. This number jumped significantly even with mask mandates, lockdowns, etc over the last 18 months:
For making a rational decision, the figure to use is the personal risk to the individual. Using excess deaths is meaningless, because if the vast majority of those deaths were in old and overweight individuals and you're neither, then those numbers are irrelevant to quantifying the risk you face.
Depending on age and condition the risk to an individual can vary from one in ten million to under one in a hundred. In your mind, what is the risk that an individual must face from covid to make it rational to take a novel treatment with no long-term safety data that hasn't passed the standard FDA approval process? In any other context, would people here be so confident that there's a less than one in ten million risk from a novel MRNA treatment?
You're off by several orders of magnitude here. See "current best estimate": https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
The "central authority" already do forbid you from accessing certain or public services for the same rules - only you need to provide the relevant paper documents. This is effectively the paperless version thereof.
You may personally disagree with the concept of proof of vaccination, but thats completely aside from the technical discussion we are having here.
You mean just like a centrally fabricated ID card that's used for entering an airport, making certain purchases, verifying ID for a CC purchase, entering the country, etc?
Just a year ago, saying that the governments will require you to produce a "vaccination passport" to enter a restaurant was laughed at as a crazy conspiracy theory, and currently, the difference between a "crazy conspiracy theory" and "reality" is about 6-12 months.
If you are talking about private services, then there are many examples where papers are needed:
• buying alcohol (ID)
• entering a nightclub (ID)
• taking a plane (ID)
• opening a bank account (SSN/ITIN)
• renting a car (driver's license)
• buying a gun (proof of residence)
Does it have access to a passport ID? Image database?
How is the one verifying the validity of the certificate supposed to check if it's actually the holder of the certificate standing in front to clear admission?
You'd still end up comparing a picture to someone's face, though, so you can't really remove the middle man without going into some dangerous facial recognition tech.
Your granny doesn’t need to verify this, these are used by employees of venues that want to limit access to their facilities to people who are either vaccinated or tested negatively.
I'm pretty sure the guard doesn't give a flying fuck about my personal information, just like the programmers - so how do I verify myself? Or am I to stay at home forever if I care about my privacy? The EU said very different things about these issues, is that forgotten now? The same goes for the other identity-related EU initiatives, where did all the talk about privacy go? Was it just propaganda, because it certainly seems so now, as there are so many so obvious loopholes it can't be an accident?
If you or your granny aren't good at reading code, you just have to trust that other members of the public who are would have made some noise in the media if something fishy was going on.
Yes -- just like you've always been, long before this pandemic. Every time you're out in public, you're out in public.
Having someone at the door look at a paper ICVP and a photo ID with their analog eyes has much better privacy properties. (Still bad though.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Certificate_of_V...
The verifier app is a dumb app that simply verifies the signature of the QR code payload and displays the relevant info on screen, which they look at with their analog eyes and compare to the photo id. The only network activity and/or storage is related to downloading the public keys of the issuing authorities.
Source code is available on github.
The QR code scanners will probably just be the official app installed on smartphones the venue will need to supply to the security personnel. Who's going to hack this? Banks can already track your credit card payments to figure out your profile, Google can track your location through your phone. Russian, Chinese or North Korean hackers probably don't care about where you spend your evenings.
"The imaginary is that which tends to become real" -André Breton
> Banks can already track your credit card payments to figure out your profile, Google can track your location through your phone.
For people who don't even avoid these easily defeated tracking vectors (with cash and de-googling), sure, vaccine passport tracking won't make a big difference.
Just because you can find a quote you think is profound and attach a name to it, doesn't justify super-paranoia. Do you get out of the house, or are you avoiding the virus? Life's about judging risks and benefits, and IMO you're way overblowing the risk of these hackers. What Andre Breton thinks is irrelevant.
Here we hide personal health information in a QR code and are expected to give random strangers 'consent' to this personal data to gain 'access' to a venue or 'service'.
Sounds awfully lot like a cookie consent-popup.
Without any kind of ID the QR code is useless.
Do you really need to know the last four if you all you really want to know if the identified person should be granted access?
I’m not sure how else to give someone the information that person X has had vaccine Y, other than actually transmitting that exact information?
Yes, it’s (slightly) sensitive information. But if one decides that we want to have a system based on this exact information, and it had to be “offline capable”, what are the options?
> Do you really need to know the last four if you all you really want to know if the identified person should be granted access?
If the requirements are that verifiers must themselves be able to decide which vaccines are acceptable, number of doses or time since last dose, and which issuers are allowed, then yes.
ID2020 anyone? remember that was always the plan.....
The pandemic was the perfect opportunity - so they coordinated between big tech and government to setup more and more tracking systems - Apple and Google knew ahead of time, just like the politicians and CEOs who ran before the announcement with buckets of share sales....
And then there is the solidarity and collective front to ensure that no dissent was heard (ie...fact checkers) and cartel like collusion between platforms to silence and coordinate news.
Then there is the fact that they have managed to make health and science immune to the forces of criticism and public disclosure....
or how about the media sucking at the tit of big tech for years trying to get at that sweet sweet ad nector....
Of course, just because something is called "good for society", doesn't mean it actually is
So it's just meaningless erosion of freedom
Umm that I elected the people who do this, and support it (or else I’d vote for someone else next time). The Chinese don’t have that privilege.
> Will citizens who are not yet vaccinated be able to travel to another EU country?
> Yes. The EU Digital COVID Certificate should facilitate free movement inside the EU. It will not be a pre-condition to free movement, which is a fundamental right in the EU.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-re...
You're basically given three options:
- get vaccinated
- get tested every 48 hours
- intentionally infect yourself with covid
Compare this to pre covid travel, and yes, it affects us greatly. Since pretty much all the countries have very low covid numbers, any such limitations are stupid.
No, don't. What we are talking here about is a Covid pass / QR code thing, not the pre-pandemic past.
> Since pretty much all the countries have very low covid numbers, any such limitations are stupid.
In just the Europe, Russia and UK have horrible numbers right now, Portugal joining them. So no, you are wrong, I am sorry but the testing/vaccine/quarantine rules make sense and will make sense in the foreseeable future.
And, does this "EU Green Pass" work in UK or russia? Because the "EU" implies EU only and the webpage[0] says that directly [1]
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-re...
[1] The EU Digital COVID Certificate will facilitate safe free movement of citizens in the EU during the COVID-19 pandemic.
No, UK/Russia are an example that we are not yet safe. In fact, the current numbers in Portugal are a direct result of influx of visitors from the UK who imported the Delta variant there.
> we're striving for the prepandemic way of life
Yes, as soon as the virus is not a big threat, we can resume the prepandemic way of life. If you look at the current numbers of people getting sick and dying from Covid, it should be clear we are not there yet. But the Covid pass is a part of normalizing the situation. I will travel in July to a vacation. I will carry the covid pass with me and as a result of that, I will not have to be tested (several times) or quarantined, despite traveling through several international (Schengen) borders.
So we've got two realistic options: 1) non-EU countries teach people their own and the EU verification method, or 2) non-EU countries offer a way to "convert" EU QR scheme to their own at the point of entry.
It's similar the other way around as well, because non-EU countries could either start issuing EU-compatible QR codes, or recepients could "convert" them to the EU-compatible QR code at the point of entry.
I'm vaccinated, the vaccine works, and I'm living accordingly. If a business wants proof, they don't get my business.