Like the government’s bills over lockdown—and its policing of it—the current proposals to implement a Covid-19 vaccine passport scheme will have resonances far beyond this current pandemic. As it stands, the most vocal opposition to the scheme is from the libertarian right. On the left, confusion reigns over what stance socialists should take on the potential roll-out of vaccine passports, though it is they who should be the most concerned about it.

The vaccine is, of course, highly beneficial in reducing instances of serious disease for the vaccinated individual. It is also very effective as a public health measure when a critical mass of people in society has been vaccinated, due to the reduced infectiousness of the population.

There may be cases where it is morally justifiable to distinguish between vaccinated and non-vaccinated individuals. For example, we might think of a care or hospital setting where a nurse, doctor, or carer has prolonged, intimate contact with very vulnerable people (although compelling workers to get vaccinated under threat of losing their job is insupportable).

But beyond these limited situations, using an individual’s health status to regulate their exclusion from public space produces social and ethical problems that are intolerable. Vaccine passports, in the form currently envisaged, are health ID cards in all but name. They prove that you’re who you say you are, they indicate whether you’re likely to be disease–free or not, and individuals will be required them to access certain areas of public life and businesses if government plans go ahead.

By doing so, this system coerces marginalised peoples out of public space or into health interventions they do not want. Not only is this ethically untenable—and potentially in violation of human rights legislation on free and informed consent for medical treatment—but it is politically unsustainable and socially divisive.

While some may see this as providing a useful ‘nudge’ towards helping people make more sensible choices, it will also generate further resistance to necessary public health measures, and through polarisation undermine the public trust in medical authorities required to defeat the virus.

A broader question is that of digital means, and those who can prove their health through those means. In the past year, softer measures like mandatory contactless payment in many bars, pubs, and cafes show how seemingly innocuous technology creates a two–tier system of social access. This is a system where low-income people workers, pensioners, and those with no access to bank accounts—a group which numbers well over a million people in the UK—are de facto excluded from many public spaces, including pubs and businesses.

The same authoritarian and exclusionary politics on which a voter ID card system is based also underpin the logic of the proposed health ID cards. Both are apparently popular with large sections of society in some way because they share the same features: both use technology and identification to exclude those deemed suspect. Those who cannot transparently display their health status on demand will be deemed opaque, suspicious, and possibly a threat to public health.

We perform similar rituals of transparency for security officials in places like airports, where we are conditioned to behave in a way that performs our innocence in these spaces. This innocence, however, is available in much greater degrees to certain ‘bona fide’ travellers, such as wealthy, white tourists and businessmen. Those not fitting this visual profile are suspicious, opaque, and deemed threatening. With health ID cards, the deeply discriminatory logic of airport security is imposed across everyday life. Accessing society freely becomes contingent on health or vaccine status – which is itself contingent on class, race, and immigration status.

There is also no doubt that health ID cards will attach stigma to certain groups, which is likely to last for many years. Without us even realising it, we may begin to associate the notion of the diseased to those identifiably unable or less willing to take the vaccine. Pregnant women, for example, are understandably more vaccine hesitant, due to no pregnant women being involved in vaccine trials, while vaccine hesitancy is highest among already marginalised groups and communities – based often on legitimate grievances and historical experiences of medical malpractice.

When the country begins to ‘open up’, people’s continued fear of the disease, combined with the knowledge of those who are least able or willing to have had the vaccine, is likely to lead to those visibly identifiable groups being publicly chastised for being threats to public health.

This will not be resolved by exemptions. The division between those considered healthy and safe and those considered a threat, and policing of the latter out of public life, will mirror many of the existing class and racial divisions of society. This is on top of blame already being meted out to sections of the public for the pandemic, where the government has successfully strategized a deflection culpability for our national disaster.

It would also be naive to excuse these as simply temporary measures, limited to certain large events, to be lifted once the pandemic is over. History shows that governments tend to retain powers granted them for apparently exceptional purposes. The post–9/11 world of surveillance we inhabit is testament to how irrevocably and deeply societies can be changed by a crisis and a fearful public. ‘Mission creep’—where surveillance technologies used to control threats go on to be deployed towards other perceived threats—is not just a possibility. It is an iron law of surveillance technologies.

In these times, such an exclusionary system might well gain widespread public support. Practical issues and political opposition from Tory backbenchers may keep health ID cards at bay from all aspects of social life—such as public transport, open spaces, pubs, and restaurants—for the time being.

But the authoritarian populism underlying the idea must be opposed on principle. This is a politics that merges reactionary and popular ideas of exclusion of the ‘other’ with technological and surveillance fixes. Establishing a precedent for excluding people from public space based on their health status could create public and political pressure to apply such a system to other risks. Many people do not realise that people living with HIV are still excluded from travelling to certain countries, with the attached stigmas of hygiene and health that come with such exclusion.

Such precedents are easily extended to a range of other situations beyond public health, demonstrated by phantom voter fraud in British polling booths being used to justify the voter ID access system that may well disenfranchise millions. There is rarely an evidence-based reason for authoritarian solutions that exclude certain populations from public life.

The mass vaccination programme in the UK is a brilliant medical feat, vital to ending the Covid-19 pandemic. Producing health surveillance checkpoints, however, is a divisive solution to a problem that does not even exist once enough people in society are vaccinated. Yet the corrosive effects of health ID cards will linger on in society and public space for years to come.

Chris Witty, the Chief Medical Officer for England, states that most experts believe that we will have to live with Covid-19 pretty much forever, in much the same way society adjusted to the flu. The question is whether we live with it by adjusting to forms of new authoritarianism—and accept coercive, exclusionary, and discriminatory measures that erode social freedom in the process—or whether we deal with it collectively, viewing public heath as something built on trust, consent, and solidarity.