Protesters from Hawaii to Florida have assembled in the streets, at town halls, and during school board meetings to voice their opposition to (and fear of) so-called “vaccine passports” that, they claim, will be used to determine if they’re eligible to go places or do things. They make it sound like proof of vaccination hasn’t been required anywhere in the history of the country, and that such a document would be fatally traumatic to their children. Just today, the paragon of virtue Jim Jordan declared “Vaccine mandates are un-American.”
Rummaging through an old box, I found my personal “vaccine passport” that allowed me to go to school in the 1970s and 1980s. It documents the mandatory vaccines I needed to have to attend classes: DTP, oral polio, measles, rubella, and mumps. (And just for the record, the nurse noted I was also inoculated against small pox.) If vaccine passports are “un-American,” the nation has been un-American since my childhood.