Scientists have favorable opinions on immunity certificates but raise concerns regarding fairness and inequality

Abstract

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected over 12,000 responses from a survey of scientists, who were asked to express their opinions on immunity certificates (also called "immunity passports") as a potential instrument to lessen the impact of the crisis. Overall, we find that scientists perceive immunity certificates as favorable for public health (50.2%) and the state of the economy (54.4%) while one-fifth (19.1%) and one-sixth (15.4%) disagree. Scientists stipulate some concerns about fairness (36.5%) and inequality (22.4%) arising from implementation of immunity certification. We find some smaller differences among scientific fields, particularly between health scientists and social scientists, with the latter being slightly more positive about the effect of immunity certification. Scholars in the United States, including health scientists, are more likely to view the immunity certificates favorably and mention fewer concerns about this policy's effect on fairness and inequality. Female scholars are significantly less in favor of immunity certificates, while scientists with more conservative political views hold more favorable opinions. Our results reveal that given the uncertainties during an early phase of a pandemic, scientists see scope for immunity certification to lessen the general societal impacts of the crisis.

Figure 1

Scientists’ attitudes towards immunity certificates. N = 12,738 participants. (A) Distribution of responses to the statements “Is giving immune people immunity certificates for the duration of their immunity…” regarding (1) good for public health; (2) good for the economy; (3) fair to others who do not have immunity; and (4) increasing inequality. Share of respondents who did not answer ranges from 15.3 to 15.9%. (B) Willingness to self-infect for immunity certificate that lifts social-isolation and travel restrictions, if medically assessed as low-risk or high-risk groups. (C) Willingness to pay for immunity certificate that lifts social-isolation and travel restrictions. Share of respondents who did not answer ranges from 18.2 to 18.9%.

Figure 2

Difference in views on immunity certificates between US and non-US based scientists. (A) Views regarding perceived benefits to public health and economy, fairness, and societal inequality of immunity certificate. (B) Willingness to self-infect for immunity certificate that lifts social-isolation and travel restrictions. (C) Willingness to pay for immunity certificate that lifts social-isolation and travel restrictions. Two-sample mean comparison with t-test (two-tailed). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Significance levels: ***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05, †p < .1. Results are robust to using the Wilcoxon rank sum test (Supplementary Table 4).

Figure 3

Consensus among scientists. The entropy-based consensus measure takes the value of 1 when all responses are concentrated on one option and value of 0 when responses are evenly distributed in each available option. (A) Views on perceived benefits to public health and economy, fairness, and societal inequality of immunity certificates. (B) Willingness to pay for an immunity certificate that lifts social-isolation and travel restrictions. (C) Willingness to self-infect for an immunity certificate that lifts social-isolation and travel restrictions. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals obtained from bootstrap resampling with 300 replications. Null responses are excluded from the calculation of consensus.

Figure 4

Ordered logit regressions. Presented are odd ratios of covariates from 10 ordered logit regressions for (A) perceived benefits to public health and the economy, and fairness and inequality concerns and (B) willingness to pay and willingness to self-infect for immunity certificate. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Full regression results are presented in Supplementary Table 10 for (A) and Supplementary Table 11 for (B).