"As more and more people get vaccinated, it's going to get safer for all sorts of places to open up again,"
Trevor Noah said on Tuesday's Daily Show. "But the question is, how will businesses know which of their customers have actually been vaccinated?" One idea is gaining traction and making talking heads explode. "Yes, welcome to the world of 'vaccine passports,' which I think are a great and simple way to show that you're immune from corona," Noah said. "I mean, I've just been going around yelling that I've been shot, and you'd think people would relax knowing that I've been vaccinated, but they always seem to freak out. People are weird."
Vaccine passports "can help give businesses peace of mind," Noah said. "American businesses want to know that the customers legally carrying assault rifles into their store aren't going to sneeze on anyone." Carrying around proof of vaccination "may sound like a novel idea, but it's really nothing new," he added. "People already have to prove that they've been vaccinated for a ton of reasons," but "just like most things in America, vaccine passports aren't without controversy. In fact,
Republican governors in
Texas and
Florida have already banned businesses in their state from requiring one. And the very idea of vaccine passports has
Fox News so freaked out, they've started standing up for the undocumented."
Noah showed some Fox News clips and tried to inject some calming humor. "First of all, this is not 'the end of human liberty in the West' — that happened in 2001, when they shut down Napster," he joked. "And look, they can say that this is Nazi
Germany, but nobody's forcing you to get a vaccine passport. Like, if you don't want one, don't get one. You'll just have to pay a coyote to sneak you into Dunkin Donuts."
"Just because Fox News is being dramatic doesn't mean that there aren't some legitimate concerns around a vaccine passport — especially if that passport ends up being a
smartphone app," Noah noted. "Not everybody has a smartphone ... but paper vaccine passports could have all kinds of issues, too. They can be forged, they can get lost, a girl could trick you into writing your phone number on it, and now she's vaccinated." Watch his suggested solutions below.