Passport to Neoliberal Normality? A Critical Exploration of COVID-19 Vaccine Passports

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the world including in France, Canada, Lithuania, Austria, Italy, and Ireland imposed ‘vaccine passports’ on the premise that they would curtail transmission of the virus, reduce COVID-19 related mortalities, and enable society to return to neoliberal normality. However, vaccine passports raise several issues that have not been given sufficient attention within the social sciences. Vaccine passports should be of criminological and zemiological concern because of their harmful consequences upon social relations, surveillance implications, as well as how they aid a return to neoliberal normality with all its criminogenic implications from corporate boardrooms to zones of permanent recession. Therefore, this article offers a critique of vaccine passports. It is structured into three key themes: (a) scientifically and ethically problematic, (b) the death of the social and the ‘Other’, and (c) digital surveillance and freedom. The paper begins by exploring how vaccine passports make little scientific sense and further entrench some unvaccinated peoples’ sense of political and medical mistrust. It then discusses how they amplify social divisions, creating the unvaccinated Other in society and intensifying the neoliberal shift towards a post-social, contactless world. The article closes with an outline of how vaccine passports were cast as enabling a return to neoliberalism and freedom, hinging upon an assumption of harmlessness while cementing the negative ideology of capitalist realism