Immunity Passports: Pandemic Privilege or Biological Discrimination?  

As governments around the world seek paths toward reopening their economies and away from the "social distancing" restrictions that have been imposed in order to control the spread of covid-19, immunity passports have been proposed as one solution. Françoise Baylis and Natalie Kofler will discuss and answer questions about the many ethical, practical, and scientific challenges posed by immunity passports and other types of state-sanctioned health checks.

Françoise Baylis is a philosopher whose innovative work aims to move the limits of mainstream bioethics and develop more effective ways to understand and tackle public policy challenges. Baylis brings her ethical sensibilities, informed by best practices, theory and common sense, to a wide range of public issues. She is a frequent guest on CBC and Radio Canada and the author of many news stories with a “behind the scenes” look at ethical issues. Her current research focuses on heritable human genome modification, the body economy, assisted human reproduction, and research involving women. She will serve as the 2020-21 Wayne Morse Chair.

Natalie Kofler is a molecular biologist and founding director of Editing Nature at Yale University, a global initiative to steer responsible development and deployment of environmental genetic technologies. She also serves as an adviser for the Scientific Citizenship Initiative, Harvard Medical School. Natalie’s work navigates the technical, ecological, and ethical complexity of gene editing applications designed to impact wild species, such as CRISPR-edited mosquitos to prevent malaria transmission, genetic strategies to eliminate invasive species, or the use of CRISPR gene editing to promote species resiliency to changing climates.