Rep. Warren Davidson Introduces Bill to Ban Federal Government from Issuing Vaccine Passports

Republican Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) introduced a bill on Thursday in an effort to ban the federal government from issuing vaccine passports.

The Vaccine Passport Prevention Act would also restrict states and ban private businesses from requiring proof of coronavirus vaccination because doing so is “an inherent violation of civil liberties,” Fox News reported.

In an interview with Fox News, Davidson said:

They’re not really providing a rational basis for discriminatory activity. They’re busy separating healthy people from other healthy people on the presumption that people without a vaccine are not healthy. It’s a violation of civil liberties.

Fox News was the first to obtain a copy of the Vaccine Passport Prevention Act. If the bill is passed, states that try to issue a vaccine passport requirement would lose federal funding, and private businesses connected to interstate commerce would be barred from receiving federal funding for two years. Anyone who is denied service because of their vaccination status would also be granted the right to sue that business.

Schools, health care providers, and the military would still be allowed to require coronavirus vaccines because those entities have been allowed to require other vaccines in the past. Fox News reported:

This goes significantly further than bills introduced earlier this year, including by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., that would only prevent the federal government from issuing vaccine passports. It is highly unlikely to pass the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives or ever become law. But it does represent growing opposition from Republicans to vaccine passports that’s been reflected in similar bans in several states.

Davidson introduced his bill just as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said this week that the federal government should “encourage” the private sector to utilize vaccine passports.

“If a company, a business wants to take steps to keep their workers and their passengers safe, I would think that, from a government perspective, we want to do everything we can to encourage that,” Buttigieg told FOX 4 Monday. “And that’s certainly our view at the federal level.”

But a Department of Transportation spokesman told Fox News, “the Biden administration does not support any form of government-mandated vaccine passport,” Breitbart News previously reported.