Why Don't You Trust Us Like Your Breathtakingly Naive Parents Used To Do.....?

WaPo |  Our family wasn’t much for heirlooms.

My mother, especially in her years as a busy young wife of an Air Force officer, tended to shed things, rather than save and curate them, as we moved every year or two.

So when I was going through her belongings after she died in 2015, I wasn’t surprised to find that there were not very many artifacts of my early years.

One of the few items she thought was important enough to keep was a little yellow booklet, a small document with many addendums, held together by staples that rusted decades ago.

On the front cover, above my name, it says, “International Certificates of Vaccination as Approved by the World Health Organization.” Inside are page after page of records of the immunizations and boosters I received — for typhus, typhoid, polio, flu, cholera, smallpox.

There are those on the right today who would call this a “vaccine passport.” Demanding that people show evidence of their covid-19 vaccination status has become a front in the raging culture wars. States across the country are moving to restrict schools and other institutions from requiring people to demonstrate their vaccination status or immunity to the virus.

How did we come to this? Immunizations have long been required for international travel. Do residents of this country deserve any less transparency and protection? There exist vaccines that are safe and effective against a virus that has killed more than 600,000 in the United States and whose new strain is turning its fury on the unvaccinated.

The stipulations of my own immunization record were unbending: “It is the responsibility of the traveler to have the ‘approved stamp’ applied to the smallpox vaccination certificate or the cholera vaccination certificate. The certificate is not valid without the stamp and may not be accepted when required in international travel.”