Marc Elrich, a Montgomery County resident and a former city councilman in Takoma Park, has loudly called for a countywide mandatory vaccine passport for entry into restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and so on.
Rising case counts in the Maryland county make that prudent, he argues. He has called for this policy for a month now. Yet, no proposal has appeared before the county council. Elrich is kind of peeved.
What’s odd is that Elrich is the county executive, and every single member of the county council is a Democrat like him. He wants a vaccine passport law, but he’s unwilling to introduce one himself.
It’s a perfect example of the flaw with vaccine passports for public accommodations: Nobody believes they actually make people safer.
Elrich says he wants to create the mandatory vaccine passports but only as part of “collective action” with neighboring municipalities.
“I support the development of a regional or statewide vaccination passport,” Elrich said a few weeks ago. “It wouldn’t do us any good just to do it in one county, but if the regional leaders are interested — and some of them might be — doing this together as a collective action would help make all of our residents safer.”
Why would it “not do us any good to do it in one county?”
Elrich has said a vaccine passport in the county would actually “encourage people to do more things.”
“By allowing us to maintain our capacity and our ability to serve people,” he said, “we actually could become the destination to go to if people have a confidence level that dining in Montgomery County is safer.”
He has a point, but he also undermines one of his other arguments. If people are really holding back because they want to socialize only in all-vaccinated crowds, Montgomery County could win big by becoming the first mover on this score. Imagine all the people of Howard, Frederick, Prince George’s, and Fairfax counties, plus the District of Columbia, knowing they could cross a single county border and be in a place where every fellow diner, gym user, moviegoer, and drinker was vaccinated.
But then, by Elrich’s reasoning, a vaccine passport just in the county would be a huge boon — why wait for a state or regional solution?
Alternatively, if requiring a vaccine check at the door was a major turnoff to customers, then you can see why Elrich would demand “collective action.”
And last year, Elrich had no problem punishing businesses in the name of battling coronavirus. So… he’s suddenly shied away from that?
Maybe the problem is that people don’t actually believe that requiring vaccine passports at the door will make people behind the door any safer.
