Data, Tech & Black Communities

Digital vaccine passports are novel technologies, built on uncertain and evolving science. By creating infrastructure for segregation and risk scoring at an individual level, and enabling third-parties to access health information, they bring profound risks to individual rights and concepts of equity in society.

Exclusive: Equalities watchdog tells government documents could create ‘two-tier society’

In the U.K., a recent poll suggested that while Britons were strongly supportive of vaccine passports in principle, agreement broke down when asked whether they should be compulsory for pub visits. For marginalised groups, this feels like nudge theory to overcome a reluctance (based on real trauma) to trust public health services: “some employees who don’t want to get the vaccine feel harassed and ostracized.”

Distrust has its roots in ‘scientific’ experiments that aimed to prove racial superiority. As the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine continues across the UK, with more than 14m already having had the jab, in communities of colour there remains deep concern over its safety. Polls show that people of colour are around 20 per cent less likely to have a vaccination than the population as a whole.