Letters | Why expanding the vaccine pass scheme defeats its very purpose

Readers debate the wisdom of expanding the vaccine pass scheme at this point in the pandemic, and discuss why Hong Kong should reward, rather than punish, the vaccinated

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A person uses the Leave Home Safe app to enter the Ambulatory Care Centre at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Jordan on June 13. Patients must now have a vaccine pass to enter designated healthcare premises primarily providing non-urgent medical services. Photo: Sam Tsang

Published: 11:30am, 15 Jun 2022

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, variations of a vaccine pass policy have been implemented in many societies in the world. The policy typically requires citizens to be vaccinated before entering certain venues to boost overall vaccine uptake and lower the risk of outbreaks.

There are, however, very few jurisdictions that have imposed a vaccine pass covering such a wide range of venues and such a prolonged period as in Hong Kong. Recently, even some public healthcare facilities intended for those who cannot afford private healthcare have been listed.

Technically, this vaccine pass will expire with the Prevention and Control of Disease (Vaccine Pass) Regulation (Cap. 559L) at some point, but the government has provided no clear timeline and the public has been left confused as to the ultimate goal of this policy.

First, the first-dose vaccination rate among the Hong Kong population (those aged three or above) has now surpassed 92 per cent, while more than 80 per cent of those aged 60 or above have been vaccinated. The daily number of first doses administered is now typically less than 2,000, compared with more than 45,000 back in February. It shows that the effect of the vaccine pass on uptake is rapidly diminishing and it thus seems increasingly unjustifiable to deny hundreds of unvaccinated individuals access to certain public healthcare services, let alone dining places and shopping malls.

Second, the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants, which are now far more prevalent that earlier strains, has significantly weakened the effectiveness of vaccines, including mRNA and other technological platforms. Data from England shows that even the booster dose of the widely used Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine typically results in little over 50 per cent immunity against the Omicron BA.2 variant just 15 weeks after vaccination. The function of the vaccine pass in lowering infection risk is, therefore, much limited amid the transmission of an ever-evolving virus.

Third and most important, with the expansion of venues requiring proof of vaccination to enter, it is inevitable that unvaccinated individuals will be driven to gather in places where no vaccine pass is needed, instead of being scattered among the vaccinated to lower the risk of infection and the speed of transmission. This consequence defeats the very purpose of the mass roll-out of vaccines, that is, to protect the entire population, vaccinated or unvaccinated.