Depolarizing the COVID Vaccine Passport

Vaccine passports are a hotly debated and highly polarizing issue in U.S. politics. Proponents of vaccine passports have emphasized that they can create a brighter future; this Essay suggests that these proponents would be well-advised to point to the past as well. Public and private institutions have long required proof of vaccination both to engage in certain activities on U.S. soil and to travel internationally. We conducted an experiment with a sample of approximately 3,200 Americans to investigate whether explaining that vaccine passports are not a novel idea can (1) increase support for COVID-19 vaccine passports, (2) increase the number of people who intend to get vaccinated if a COVID-19 vaccine passport were introduced, and (3) depolarize views on COVID-19 vaccine passports. We find strong evidence that status quo bias—bias arising from knowledge that requiring proof of vaccination from other diseases is a well-established practice— will help to achieve all three goals. Our results are statistically significant and robust to a battery of controls and suggest that status quo bias can help depolarize the policy discourse surrounding vaccine passports.