Scientists’ opinion, attitudes, and consensus towards immunity passports

Objectives: We measured attitudes towards “immunity passports” in the context of COVID-19 of a large sample of scientists. Consensus of scientists’ opinions on a different aspect of immunity passports was assessed.

Methods: We designed and implemented a survey to capture what scientists from around the world and different scientific background think about immunity certification. The survey was sent to the corresponding authors of scholarly articles published in the last five years in the top 20-ranked journals in each of the 27 subject areas between May and June 2020. Responses from 12,738 scientists were captured, and their distribution was tabulated by participants in health science and other fields. Consensus of responses was calculated using a variant of Shannon Entropy, made suitable for the ordinal response variables.

Results: Half of the scientists surveyed, regardless of academic background agree that a potential immunity passport program will be good for public health (50.2%) and the economy (54.4%), with 19.1% and 15.4% of participants disagree, respectively. A significant proportion of scientists raised concerns about immunity certification over fairness to others (36.5%) and social inequality (45.5%). There is little consensus in the different aspects of immunity passport among scientists. Overall, scientists with health background hold a more conservative view towards immunity certification.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest a lack of general agreement regarding the potential health and economic benefits, societal costs, and ethical issues of an immunity certification program within the scientific community. Given the relevant and important implications of immunity passport due to the increasing vaccine availability and efficacy, more attention should be given to the discussion of the design and implementation of immunity certification program.

Strengths and limitations of this study:
• First cross-disciplinary survey with a large and international sample size that enables mapping of scientists’ opinions and attitudes towards COVID-19 immunity certificates.
• From the survey responses, we measured, reported, and compared the levels of consensus of scientists between health-related and non-health-related discipline.
• Response rate and sample representativeness are moderate.