Journal article : Comment
Learning from the past and present: social science implications for COVID-19 immunity-based documentation
- Abstract:
- In responding to the widespread impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have proposed and implemented documentation policies that confer varying levels of freedoms or restrictions (e.g., ability to travel) based on individuals’ infection status or potential immunity. Most discussions around immunity- or infection-based documentation policies have focused on scientific plausibility, economic benefit, and challenges relating to ethics and equity. As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out, attention has turned to confirmation of immunity and how documentation such as vaccine certificates or immunity passports can be implemented. However, the contextual inequities and local variabilities interacting with COVID-19 related documentation policies hinder a one-size-fits-all approach. In this Comment, we argue that social science perspectives can and should provide additional insight into these issues, through a diverse range of current and historical examples. This would enable policymakers and researchers to better understand and mitigate current and longer-term differential impacts of COVID-19 immunity-based documentation policies in different contexts. Furthermore, social science research methods can uniquely provide feedback to inform adjustments to policy implementation in real-time and help to document how these policy measures are felt differently across communities, populations, and countries, potentially for years to come. This Comment, updated as of 15 August 2021, combines precedents established in historical disease outbreaks and current experiences with COVID-19 immunity-based documentation policies to highlight valuable lessons and an acute need for further social science research which should inform effective and context-appropriate future public health policy and action.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Reviewed (other)
Actions
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Humanities and Social Sciences Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 8
- Article number:
- 219
- Publication date:
- 2021-09-27
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-09-06
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2662-9992
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Subtype:
-
Comment
- Pubs id:
-
1193996
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1193996
- Deposit date:
-
2021-09-09
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Dada et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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