Scientists’ opinion, attitudes, and consensus towards immunity passports

  1. Iván Aranzales
  2. Ho Fai Chan
  3. Reiner Eichenberger
  4. Rainer Hegselmann
  5. David Stadelmann
  6. Benno Torgler

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Abstract

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.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.02.21250796: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Statistical analyses: Statistical analyses were conducted using STATA (MP 16.1) statistical software.
    STATA
    suggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.02.02.21250796v1 on medRxiv