Starbucks, the UK, Czechia, and Israeli health experts now regret their vaccine mandates and passports

But on Thursday, the painfully woke coffee chain backed down. Notably, the company cited last week’s Supreme Court ruling that Biden could not force companies to require vaccines. The court, in effect, ruled it was up to Starbucks to decide whether to require vaccination. Once Starbucks knew it had a choice, it dropped the mandate like a hot rock.

On a larger scale, the United Kingdom is doing the same thing. Boris Johnson is nixing the vaccine passport in the U.K., citing the country’s clearing of the omicron surge in cases. The unvaccinated are now free to go to concerts, bars, or wherever they like.

New York City is clearly over the hump, with the seven-day average already down 50% from its peak. Yet the city still forces all restaurants to make you show your health papers at the door. The same is true of Washington, D.C.

My own county, Montgomery County, Maryland, is actively debating introducing a new vaccine passport program despite the caseload being down 50% from its peak. In fact, MoCo just posted a one-month low in cases earlier this week.

However, these woke U.S. jurisdictions are clearly the exception, not the rule.

The Czech Republic is scrapping its recent plans to institute a vaccine passport requirement.

In Israel, a chorus of infectious disease experts who once supported that country’s “Green Pass,” a vaccine passport, no longer think it’s a good idea.

“Today, there is no relevance to the Green Pass,” Professor Gili Regev-Yochay told the Jewish News Syndicate.

“At this time it is irrelevant since the omicron variant infects both vaccinated and unvaccinated at a similar rate,” Prof. Cyrille Cohen, an expert on immunology from Bar-Ilan University, told Israeli publication Hamodia, which reported that “the ‘Green Pass’ is about to be scrapped.”

Four makes a trend. Starbucks, the U.K., Czechia, and Israel are all running away from vaccine passports. This makes perfect sense. The primary rationale for a vaccine passport is that it keeps a place safe from COVID-19 spread. This is why schools require measles vaccines, for instance.

While the COVID-19 vaccines have proven effective at preventing hospitalization and death (plus making mild cases milder), they have fallen short of their promise of stopping the spread. The omicron variant has shredded the argument for vaccine mandates. A South African study has shown boosters don’t prevent omicron infection.

The strongest argument for vaccine mandates or passports is they will make workplaces or public accommodations safer by limiting the spread. Defenders of these requirements today are forced to run to a far weaker and more meandering argument:

1. Vaccines reduce hospitalizations (true!).
2. Mandates and passports drive up vaccine uptake (true in some circumstances, but not all, and maybe not true today in most places in the United States).
3. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 impose costs on the hospital system that have externalities, such as overcrowding some hospitals (leading to loss of care for other patients) and driving public spending on healthcare.
4. Therefore, the government has a strong enough interest in increasing vaccine uptake to overcome the rights of privacy and self-determination.

Yes, there’s a logic there, but it’s a double bank shot: Locking the unvaccinated out of museums may increase the odds the unvaccinated will get vaccinated, and getting vaccinated decreases the odds you will get hospitalized, which in turn decreases the odds the hospitals will be overwhelmed.

That’s too indirect and speculative to justify forcing people to get a medical procedure. That reasoning could lead to all sorts of restrictions on what we eat, how much we exercise, when we procreate, or how many children we have.

More and more people are realizing the argument for vaccine passports and mandates is far weaker than it sounded last year.