Stop grousing about vaccine ‘passports’ — they’re the key to reopening society

It was a bright yellow booklet I carried everywhere, and at some national borders it was scrutinized even more carefully than my government-issued passport. It was my vaccine certificate, showing the dates I’d received shots or screenings for more than half a dozen diseases. In sub-Saharan Africa, where I traveled as an LA Times correspondent in the 1980s and 1990s, these included yellow fever, polio, meningitis, hepatitis, measles and tuberculosis.