COVID-19 passports did little to convince people to get vaccinated in Quebec, Ontario: study

All 10 provinces and Yukon introduced vaccine passport systems in 2021, justifying them as a tool to avoid further generalized lockdowns and increase vaccination rates.

COVID-19 vaccine passports in Quebec and Ontario did little to convince the unvaccinated to get the jab and did not significantly reduce inequalities in vaccination coverage, a new peer-reviewed study has found.

The passports, which forced people to show proof of vaccination to enter places such as bars and restaurants, were directly responsible for a rise of 0.9 per cent in the vaccination rate in Quebec and 0.7 per cent in Ontario, says Jorge Luis Flores, a research assistant at McGill University and lead author of the paper published Tuesday in the CMAJ Open journal.

Compared to wealthier parts of Quebec and Ontario, low-income neighbourhoods in both provinces tended to have higher rates of COVID-19 and lower vaccine coverage, he said in an interview. Areas in Quebec with large racialized populations also had lower vaccination rates, though the opposite was true in Ontario.

“What we saw was that, overall, the vaccine passport had very little impact on reducing those inequalities,” Flores said.

All 10 provinces and Yukon introduced vaccine passport systems in 2021, justifying them as a tool to avoid further generalized lockdowns and increase vaccination rates, though some provinces allowed people to show a recent negative COVID-19 test instead of proof of vaccination.

The passports were discontinued across Canada by the spring of 2022.

The study looked at vaccine uptake trends in the weeks before the announcement of vaccine passports in Quebec and Ontario, using them to simulate what would have happened had those provinces not imposed the passport system.

In the 11 weeks after the provinces announced the passports, vaccination rates in both provinces rose by five percentage points. But after considering the uptake trends, researchers concluded the passports were directly responsible for a rise of less than one per cent in vaccination rates, says Mathieu Maheu-Giroux, study co-author and McGill University professor who studies public health.