A Documentary History of the Immunity (or Vaccine) Passport: Health Certificates of Public Health, Personal Identity and Power from the Plague to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

This article examines the immunity passport as a historical and material document used across diverse health crises to establish and verify individuals' health status, regulate mobility, and enforce public health measures. Tracing its origins over half a millennium, it explores four cases: plague-era Mediterranean city-states, the 1665 Great Plague of London, yellow fever outbreaks in antebellum southern USA, and cholera control in colonial British India. The immunity passport functioned alongside quarantines as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, often intertwining with social hierarchies by privileging the wealthy and marginalizing the poor, and intersecting with racial and religious identities in some contexts. By situating the immunity passport within frameworks of history, government, jurisprudence, and resistance, the article highlights its complex role in shaping health identity, social control, and mobility, offering insights relevant to contemporary debates on COVID-19 vaccine passports.