F

or those currently unaware, in the state of 
Michigan, everyone — and yes that means 
everyone — above the age of 16 is eligible to receive 

a COVID-19 vaccine as of April 5. This is the case country-
wide, for the most part, with the exception of a few states 
that are expanding their eligibility soon. 

In other words, the time to get vaccinated is upon us. 

The University of Michigan has already vaccinated over 
40,000 individuals and that number is likely to increase 
soon, particularly among our now eligible student 
population. As I wrote not long ago, it is imperative that 
students get vaccinated as soon as possible; doing so is not 
only vital for the betterment of the community’s public 
health, but also for increasing the possibilities 
for various gatherings and related activities 
during the upcoming fall semester. 

On a national scale, around 35% of the 

United States’s population has received at 
least the first dose of a vaccine. If we remain at 
the current pace of vaccination, we can expect 
that number to reach at least 75% by the end of 
June, if not higher. Slowly but surely, normal is in 
sight — so again, go get vaccinated. 

Now that my biweekly plea to my peers to get 

vaccinated has been made, it’s important to also 
think about what happens after the U.S. has reached 
the target vaccination level. After all, for many, 
including myself, normalcy includes the freedom to travel 
internationally. On either end — traveling outside of the 
U.S. or returning home — proof of vaccination is likely 
going to be a requirement for entry at some point. 

Vaccination passports, which are essentially digitized 

proofs of vaccination, are beginning to be tested by a 
handful of companies and institutions here in the U.S. 
While the topic remains relatively controversial amongst 
some politicians, a vaccination mandate of some sort could 
possibly be a smart idea (and a legal one, for those worried) 
for maintaining safety within some contexts. 

But the argument against these “passports” is more 

nuanced than the blanket statement of “I don’t like the 
restrictions a mandate like this imposes on my freedoms,” 
although that certainly is a stance for those also against 
vaccination in the first place. To those individuals, I 
urge you to read the Centers for Disease Control and 

Prevention’s article detailing the benefits of vaccination. 

Now, back to my main point. To illustrate it best, 

let’s consider a hypothetical. You are looking to attend a 
Detroit Pistons game with some friends next winter and 
the NBA, or even simply the Pistons themselves, have 
an application or system that requires you to sign in and 
verify your vaccination status. While for some it won’t be 
an issue, there are many who will be concerned about 
the fact that the Detroit Pistons organization now has 
access to part of their health-related information — your 
vaccination records and maybe more. That is just one 

possible scenario. 

Imagine how many leisure or non-essential activities 

one does within a week, such as dining at a restaurant 
or going to the gym. Depending on how something 
like a vaccination passport is implemented, all of these 
organizations could theoretically have data about parts 
of your vaccination history. 

While that concern could likely be mitigated if a 

standardized means of checking vaccination status can 
be established, we are far from that point. The companies 
and institutions experimenting with such a system are 
not using the same means of checking vaccination status; 
each is using their own technologies and that variation 
in technology is where the heart of the privacy concern 
comes into play. If every company across the U.S. were 
to use the same methods for checking, privacy concerns 
could likely be quelled. 

There is also the concern of the false sense of security 

that implementing a standardized vaccination passport 
might bring. There will be many that will likely interpret 
such proof of vaccination as equivalent to not having the 
disease, or being safe from getting it. Indeed, the approved 
COVID-19 vaccines have shown to be effective in trials 
thus far, but one should not equate vaccination with 
guaranteed immunity.

And, of course, there are various equity-related 

concerns. 
Both 
domestically 
and 
especially 

internationally, many have not or are not going to be able 
to receive a vaccine for some time. In that regard, there 
has to be a push and pull between mandating vaccination 
and making sure the white and wealthy do not have an 

unfair “immuno-privilege” because of how access to 

vaccines has unfolded on a global scale. 

At the same time, vaccination passports 

have the ability to establish an efficient and 
possibly more reliable means of keeping the 
virus from entering certain establishments, 
or even the country as a whole. In other 
words, the passport idea is not all bad. Proof 
of vaccination, at the end of the day, is the 
most likely way of providing assurance that 
one does not have COVID-19. The implications 
for hospitals, care facilities, etc., who have been 
restricting loved ones from connecting while 
sick with other conditions are considerable. 
With all of that being said, in no way should 

these criticisms of passports persuade anyone from 
getting vaccinated. They are the most effective way to 
protect oneself from the virus and to ensure a return to 
some degree of normalcy soon, at least domestically. Still, 
as more of us get vaccinated, there will need to be some 
thorough policy considerations from our governments 
and the private sector. Prioritizing privacy, equity and 
public health all at the same time is not an easy thing to 
do — but it needs to be done. 

Until we reach that point, the message remains the 

same: Go get vaccinated. For U-M students, there are only 
about two weeks left in the semester; make it happen so 
the fall can be enjoyed alongside others. 

I

’ve talked a great deal about the ongoing sanctions 
campaign by the United States against Iran — arguably 
more than anyone should. Nevertheless, I believe there is 

a good reason for talking about the sanctions so much: They are 
one of the longest sustained campaigns of immiseration against 
any country, outside of wartime, in the last century. 

As I stated in my column in January, they have wreaked 

havoc on Iran’s economy and severely hampered its ability to 
fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, in April, as the academic 
semester draws to a close, I’d like to turn away from the 
humanitarian devastation these sanctions have wrought and 
instead turn to the diplomatic devastation. Specifically, I would 
like to examine how President Joe Biden’s refusal to rejoin the 
Iran nuclear deal unless Iran’s government meets ridiculous 
preconditions is a massive error that could haunt him for the 
rest of his presidency. 

First, a little background. The current sanctions on Iran 

were put into place in 2018 as part of former President Donald 
Trump’s decision to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of 
Action, colloquially referred to as the “Iran nuclear deal.” Our 
side of that deal was agreeing not to re-impose sanctions in 
exchange for Iran not developing nuclear weapons. Since the 
Iran nuclear deal was widely seen as one of former President 
Barack Obama’s key foreign policy achievements, it was natural 
that then-candidate Biden would support rejoining it. And, 
to his credit, he technically hasn’t broken that promise. That 
is because, even during the campaign, he stated that the U.S. 
would only rejoin the deal “if Iran returns to strict compliance,” 
which they have not done yet. 

However, Iran has a good reason not to make the first step 

toward compliance. We broke compliance first, not them. In 
fact, not only did they not resume building nuclear weapons 
until after we abandoned the deal, they did not resume building 
nuclear weapons until last November, two and a half years later. 
And they only did so after their top nuclear scientist, Mohsen 
Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in an ambush that Iran alleges 
was coordinated by the Israeli government. By any reasonable 
standards of deal-making, it is incumbent on the party that 
originally broke the deal to take the first steps toward restoring 
it — therefore, the U.S. should initiate the return to compliance.

Even if Biden were to reverse course today and repeal 

sanctions, it may be too late. Iran has a presidential election 
this summer, and incumbent President Hassan Rouhani — the 
moderate who signed the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 — cannot run 
again because he is term-limited. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s breaking 
of the Iran deal is widely perceived to have given an advantage to 
the conservative, or “principlist” side, which has always opposed 
the nuclear deal. After all, the principlists’ position in 2015 — that 
the U.S. was not trustworthy — has been well borne-out by our 
breaking of the deal. So, even if we were to return to the deal, it 
is not likely that the next Iranian government will trust us to 
maintain that compliance between administrations. 

Additionally, while Trump is largely to blame for breaking 

the deal in the first place and creating that mistrust, Biden’s 
refusal to drop his preconditions sends an even worse message: 
that neither U.S. party can be trusted to honestly and fairly 
maintain the deal. Biden could have earned the reputation as 
the president that at least tried to repair our broken relationship 
with Iran. Instead, he will likely go down as the president that 
solidified our diplomacy’s ruinous fate.

Moreover, regardless of if Iran chooses to go back to 

upholding its end of the deal, we should go back to upholding 
ours. First, it’s the right thing to do from a humanitarian 
standpoint. Even if Iranians choose to elect a government that 
wants to build nuclear weapons, that is still not a just reason to 
continue to starve their people. Think tanks funded by large 
defense corporations, which benefit from presenting Iran as 
a threat, do not believe that Iran would use these weapons 
offensively, so essentially we are causing immense pain to the 
Iranian people to deny them the capacity to defend themselves. 

But, more relevantly to our diplomatic interests, returning to 

compliance with no immediate reward would show Iranians 
that the principlist view of America is wrong and that we have 
the potential to be an honest and trustworthy deal maker. And 
while it is highly unlikely that the next Republican president 
would maintain compliance with the deal, especially if Iran 
doesn’t immediately stop building weapons, being an honest 
actor half the time still sends a better message to Iran, and to the 
world, than never being one at all.

Opinion
16 — Wednesday, April 21, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

SIERRA ÉLISE HANSEN | COLUMNIST

A

ccording to the bipartisan standards 
by which political “truths” are 
measured and spoon-fed to us, truth 

has come to sound more like something to 
aspire to rather than a lived, tangible reality. 
If you are like the average person, surfing the 
internet feels like a part of being alive. You 
might feel as if you’re always consuming a lot 
of information (primarily tweets and scandals 
rather than Dostoyevsky), but nevertheless, 
reading is a part of your day.

Especially given the ubiquity of the internet 

amid the ongoing pandemic, one can assume 
that many Americans have spent even more 
time with their thoughts hovering in virtual 
space than they did before. And, that’s in a 
world which unapologetically centered the 
internet during pre-pandemic times.

As someone who relied on libraries as 

sanctuaries of focus before quarantine, I 
had to implement huge adjustments in order 
to focus at home. More than that, I simply 
yearned for the feeling of holiness that would 
pass over me as I opened a hard-bound book 
from a time period that lapsed before I was 
born. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to 
reproduce anything close to it in quarantine, 
and indeed I have not.

In direct opposition to a work of writing that 

is developed over many weeks, months and 
sometimes years, social media, like advertising, 
is constantly being run through a machine 
of algorithms and analytics. So, what are we 
missing? Reading “for pleasure” is more than 
a pastime — the slow simmering of processing 
what we read can become a catalyst for the 
mind’s steady growth. It is also a portal through 
which knowledge can be tested; that is, if we are 
granted access to that knowledge in the first 
place.

I’d like to make an abrupt suggestion, which 

is that we make a cultural shift toward an idea 
that isn’t so new after all: We should center the 
library as a mainstay of public life. Libraries are 
so much more than spaces filled with materials 
for personal consumption. Even in today’s era 
of rampant dis- and misinformation, libraries 
are still considered to be trusted, boasted public 
institutions.

During an extremely scary, uncertain fall 

semester when no one knew with any degree 
of certainty that America’s democracy would 
remain intact, it felt as if a constant swarm of 
information was flowing through my brain 
each day. It happened regardless of whether 
I wanted it to or not. Like many of you, I was 
confined to my apartment, which I often 
resented. I continuously engaged in what has 
been referred to as “doomscrolling” (or, in 
an extension of that same modern parlance, 
“doomsurfing”). 

Doomscrolling felt like the only form 

of control I was able to exercise over the 
entrapment of those circumstances; I engaged 
in it more so as a mechanism for distraction. 
As we are all aware now as we were back then, 
there was no control to be exercised at all, by 
any one of us, over anything. Well, outside of the 
act of stepping into the voting booth — maybe 
even waiting in impossibly long lines to exercise 
our right to vote.

But then I remembered something else that 

has stuck with me throughout the pandemic-
induced lockdown. Despite how the shuttering 
of libraries feels neutral, I realized that the 
continuous pang of absence resulting from my 
inability to step foot in a campus library was 
more than a deeply personal experience — it 
was the revelation of wanting to salvage the 
social purposes of the public library. More 

specifically, I remembered an op-ed in the 
New York Times penned by Eric Klinenberg, 
a sociology professor at New York University 
professor, titled, “How Libraries Can Save 
the 2020 Election.” I recall being struck 
immediately by the content of the article at the 
time that I happened across it. 

While citing Postmaster General Louis 

DeJoy’s decision to remove or cripple key 
components of America’s mail system right 
before the election, Klinenberg posits the 
importance of libraries for collective use and 
remedy. He writes that “there is a largely 
overlooked part of the civic infrastructure that 
is ready and able to help Americans exercise 
the franchise (of voting), even under these 
troubling circumstances: libraries.”

Immediately after reading that sentence, 

I pondered my own experience with the 
libraries of my youth — one of living inside 
the articulations of time-worn fonts within 
the concrete walls of my elementary school’s 
library. I recalled nostalgically that this 
childhood library had shelves lining the middle 
of the school building, and that students would 
walk past the bindings when going anywhere. 
I remembered that sometimes, when I was 
bored in class, I would steal away to these 
shelves while “going to the bathroom” so that I 
could read.

I also recalled James Baldwin discussing 

the fact that he read in his local libraries not 
out of a sense of boredom, but as an avenue 
for fighting against the limitations imposed 
upon him by the outside world — a world that 
certainly did not want him to succeed or flourish. 
Due to how Baldwin was a young Black man 
in Harlem during the 1960s, an era when the 
white status quo politicians aimed to viciously 
and purposefully oppress Black intellectuals, 

his life circumstances seemed to foreclose the 
possibility of the success he would so memorably 
achieve. However, while in conversation with 
the anthropologist Margaret Mead, Baldwin 
revealed that he’d read himself out of two 
Harlem libraries by the time he was thirteen.

Baldwin also explained to Mead that 

what he “had to do then was bring the two 
things together: the possibilities the books 
suggested and the impossibilities of the life 
around (him).” As far as the latter goes, I see 
many disturbing holdovers from the 60s when 
Baldwin was honing his craft. Predominantly 
Black schools in Detroit, Mich., are grossly 
underfunded due to, among other things, 
neglect resulting from demographic shifts 
related to white flight. What this ultimately 
means is that students from underfunded 
school districts have less overall opportunity 
to capitalize on something as intellectually 
essential as access to literature — a dearth of 
money translates easily in this case to a dearth 
of access.

One conspicuous connection that can 

be made here is that one known tool for 
remedying a particular social malady — 
that of the problem of access to reading 
material in schools with Black, Indigenous 
and other students of color — can be used to 
remedy another urgent problem of access. 
Public libraries are the systems by which 
knowledge and opportunities to exercise 
civil rights can be fairly distributed. We 
must commit to maintaining and expanding 
access through the stacks and shelves 
outside of the University of Michigan 
community.

Libraries are clearly an ideal starting 

point for improving access to both civic-
minded activities and high-quality literature 
for 
historically 
underfunded, 
neglected 

communities. They always have been, and 
always will be.

Post-pandemic, we must value libraries more

JOHN TUMPOSKY | COLUMNIST
The “vaccination passport” debate is more nuanced than it appears

John Tumpowsky is an Opinion Columnist and can be 

reached at jgtump@umich.edu.

BRANDON COWIT | COLUMNIST
Biden’s failures on Iran

Brandon Cowit is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at 

cowitb@umich.edu.

Design by Madison Grosvenor

Sierra Élise Hansen is an Opinion Columnist 

and can be reached at hsierra@umich.edu.

C

onservatism, as a political philosophy, espouses 
a commitment to liberty, the market economy 
and existing traditions and institutions. In the 

United States, conservatives adhere to the traditionalist 
principles in the Constitution and the values that the 
Founding Fathers included in the documents that created 
our nation. Essentially, conservatives want to conserve. 
Incremental change should always be preferred to radical 
change. Government involvement in our citizens’ lives is 
overreach. 

In the United States, the Republican Party is 

ostensibly the party of conservatism. But recent action by 
Republicans — politicians and citizens alike — contradict 
many of the values they claim to stand for as conservatives. 

For example, many businesses are considering 

requiring that customers show proof of a COVID-19 
vaccine before using their services. This is the free market 
at work — privately-owned businesses implementing 
guidelines that allow for access to their goods and services 
should customers choose to adhere to them. But Gov. 
Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., signed an executive order banning 
businesses from requiring vaccine “passports.” 

As a Republican, DeSantis should believe in the 

independence of businesses and oppose government 
intervention into their practices. But forbidding businesses 
to do what they believe is best for them constitutes 
interference. Additionally, the state of Florida requires 
vaccinations to send children to school, both public and 
private, showing that DeSantis’s actions are a political 
ploy, rather than meaningful policy, as the polarization of 
COVID-19 and its policies continues.

Another much, much more extreme example is the 

storming of the Capitol. The actions of the rioters in 
Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 were contrary to everything 
conservatives should stand for. Violently attacking an 
American institution neither upholds the Constitution nor 
promotes incremental change — it, in fact, is the opposite 
of both of those things.

If Republican politicians vehemently denounced this 

event as soon as it occurred and continually held this 
position, this wouldn’t represent how the Republican 
Party 
has 
abandoned 
conservatism. 
But 
many 

Republicans refuse to accept what this event means for 
the party and the country. 

In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection on Jan. 

6, one in five Republicans approved of the mob. Prominent 
Republicans have spread the baseless conspiracy 
theory that the rioters were actually so-called antifa 
sympathizers, rather than supporters of former President 
Donald Trump. There is no proof that this is true, but that 
didn’t stop Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., from saying on the 
House floor that there was “pretty compelling evidence” 
that the people who stormed the Capitol were involved 
with antifa. 

Of course, there are examples of Republicans who 

retain conservative principles. The Republican state and 
local officials who spoke out against the false claims of 
voter fraud did so because they believe in the integrity of 
American democracy and in protecting the Constitution. 

Further, on April 5, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark., vetoed 

a bill that would have restricted the ability of transgender 
people to access health care because “the state should not 
presume to jump into the middle of every medical, human 
and ethical issue.” Still, these events became news because 

they were surprising in a time where many of the opinions 
held by Americans seem to be based on cultural division 
rather than political ideology or philosophy. 

Republicans have abandoned their adherence to small 

government and traditional values and have fallen victim 
to culture wars. Rather than focusing on crafting quality 
policy, Republican politicians and citizens are focused 
on opposing any action taken by the Democrats and 
defending the so-called victims of cancel culture.

Republicans are bound to no ideology other than 

providing an outlet for people disillusioned with the 
Democratic Party. They have abandoned the political 
and religious conservatism that has guided the party for 
most of its history. While there are likely still Republicans 
in office that abhor the policies and actions of their party, 
they refuse to speak out against them. This could be 
because they fear their voters and colleagues who fully 
agree with the party’s recent initiatives, or because they 
know staying silent is the best way to further their careers. 

Parties are allowed to grow and change as time passes; 

changing party platforms is what has allowed for social 

progress and the changing role of government. But 

the Republican Party isn’t adapting to current society. 

The party is claiming to be conservative when its 

actions prove otherwise, and it is advocating for things that 
true conservatives would never want. If the Republican 
Party were truly dedicated to conservatism, it would try to 
apply the founding documents of the United States to the 
current state of politics and society.

LYDIA STORELLA | COLUMNIST

Republicans aren’t conservative anymore

Lydia Storella is an Opinion Columnist and can be 

reached at storella@umich.edu.

Design by Megan Young

