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Others have argued that it would be entirely ethical for grocery stores, restaurants and other businesses to require immunity passports of customers — that, the price of coming out is to surrender some civil liberties. “If you don’t want to carry that document or don’t trust it, you’re not coming out,” said NYU Langone Medical Center bioethicist Arthur Caplan.

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The tests measure the amount of antibodies, or proteins present in blood when the body responds to an infection caused by the virus. The tests don’t detect the virus itself, or an active infection, like the nasal and throat swab used to diagnose COVID-19, but whether the person’s immune system produced antibodies after having encountered the infection some time in the past.

However, it’s not clear which particular antibodies are actually providing immunity after the person recovers, or for how long.

It’s nice to think of an immunity passport if you’re the one “immune,” Upshur added. “Because that means there is at least the possibility that some of us would be able to freely move in the environment.”

But how to do the testing fairly and equitably? “You would need a regimen to give everybody the fair opportunity to have the test, and look at how well we’ve been rolling out testing in Ontario in the first place,” he said.

The plan would also be premised on the idea that the non-immune would remain largely sheltered until vaccines become available. But Upshur, who has been on multiple meetings with top scientific minds on World Health Organization teleconferences, says the probability that there will be a vaccine in the near future with over 90 per cent efficacy and available in seven billion doses “is almost non-existent.”