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In Israel antibody levels are a way to get the "green passport". My parents get vaccinated in the US, and since israel doesn't recognize foreign vaccinations, when they visited Israel they had to get an antibody test to be let out quarantine early. As it should them having antibodies, they were let out. As Israel doesn't have data that says they were vaccinated, they were let out as "recovered" (even though as far as we know, neither ever caught covid, and my father was in in and of the hospital over the past year so was regularly tested).

As my mother is an Israeli citizen, she was given the "green passport", as my father was only in Israel on a "tourist visa", he was not. this is just an artifact of the current Israeli system where they aren't giving "green passports" to tourists, but demonstrating that one can give them to people that show sufficient antibodies.

The US seems to have a weird ideological opposition to the idea that recovered people have immunity from Covid, even though all the science indicates that they do. There's even weird articles in the press from time to time boggling at the fact that people don't care about getting vaccinated despite having caught Covid before, as though that somehow gave them more reason to think they needed a vaccine rather than less.

Maybe we just like controlling each other's behavior? Maybe we can't handle more than one input dimension at a time, and even then that dimension needs to be binary?

The US is a place where if you incentivize getting covid, people will start trying to get covid

> For #2, if you have a medical condition that prevents you from receiving the vaccine it would require either falsified vaccine cards to show you as complying with the mandate.

IMO, people with legitimate medical conditions should just be granted excelsior passes, the same as those who are vaccinated. There's few enough people with these conditions that it shouldn't be a health issue.

Religious exemptions are the tricky one, since NYC especially has e.g. orthodox jews clustered together in their own communities. IMO, they should not got passes. If they don't want a vaccine, fine—they just won't be able to go to the movies.

Yeah, issuing the pass that doesn't differentiate between vaccinated and excluded would prevent almost all of the concern. Some people do have concerns about disclosuring health info to the government. Although the government could just buy the "anonymous" medical records and figure them out if they really wanted to.

Yeah, religious exclusions get tricky. Really the whole thing can be tricky because it comes down to philosophical beliefs of what should be mandated and for whom.

Edit: Why so many downvotes without reply?

The medical conditions folks should probably be staying locked down. The vaccines aren't a guarantee that people around you aren't contagious; just a low likelihood that you will be very contagious if you get it.

If they're around lots of people, even vaccinated folks, they'll still catch covid and die

If 99 out of 100 people are vaccinated, the remaining person should be fine. "Should be" is the key phrase here—there are no guarantees in life—but while vaccinated people can still spread the virus, they're still much less likely to do so.

It's all a probability game. Add to this that the sole unvaccinated person is the one most at risk in any given setting, and I'm really fine letting them make their own choices.

Here in Germany you get the same kind of certificate when you prove that you recovered from the disease as when you got vaccinated.

> This question was mostly based on an article I saw about a nurse who was fired because she didn't get the vaccine even though she had antibodies. It made me think it was mostly a move by some corporate lawyer limit liability.

That's ridiculous, but hey it's the blankfaces making/enforcing the rules! [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28042392