A Documentary History of the Immunity (or Vaccine) Passport: Health Certificates of Public Health, Personal Identity and Power from the Plague to the Coronavirus Pandemic

Summary The immunity (or vaccine) passport of the coronavirus pandemic, as a concept and object, is not unprecedented. This health identity document features history spanning over half-a-millennium appearing across diverse geopolitical sociocultural contexts. article presents documentary its heterogeneous material instantiations, uses effects divergent historical settings. It illuminates how has helped shaped identities public health, well impacted individual institutional agency, during crises. Four cases are explored, including plagues ravaging Renaissance Mediterranean region, 1665 Great Plague London, yellow fever outbreaks in antebellum slave-era southern USA chronic cholera conditions confronting colonial-era British India. Although disparate, these share non-pharmaceutical intervention into their respective crises that played important roles people’s lives troubled times.