CU Anschutz In The News

Similar to immunity certificates, there are also the wider ethical implications of private businesses creating and enforcing vaccine mandates, according to Dr. Daniel Goldberg, an attorney and associate professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “We are talking about differentiating groups of people, and permitting private actors to basically discriminate against them — to bar access on the basis of immunity status,”  he tells Rolling Stone. “That, in and of itself, is perilous.”

But beyond the logistics, immunity cards themselves also raise some serious ethical and legal questions, given that they are based on the concept of dividing society into two classes of people: those who have COVID-19 immunity, and those who don’t. “My instinct is that this doesn’t seem like a very good idea for a variety of different reasons,” Dr. Daniel Goldberg, an attorney and associate professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus tells Rolling Stone.

Dr. Michelle Barron, an infectious disease specialist at UCHealth [and CU School of Medicine] in Colorado, says that the virus can’t survive in the conditions under which packages are generally transported. “The virus will either dry out or will die without the appropriate humidity and temperature it prefers,” she tells Rolling Stone.