PASS System Provides a Model for Widespread Coronavirus Testing

The adult entertainment industry has been a leader in the tech industry since…well…forever. We all know how porn helped to pioneer and popularize everything from photography to VHS to online streaming video. But in the era of the coronavirus, with porn studios shuttered, the industry may be leading the way in a different area: infectious disease testing.

In a recent article at Stat News, reporter Usha Lee McFarling set forth pornography’s testing system as a model that the rest of the world could mimic in testing for Covid-193—and slowly moving toward reopening.

McFarling noted that the Rockefeller Foundation’s recent “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan” recommended a few ideas that would sound familiar to anyone familiar with the Performer Availability Screening Services (PASS) testing system. Specifically, it called for “the creation of an ‘infection database’” of recent Covid-19 test results “that could be accessed by employers, schools, TSA, and those scanning tickets for entry into sports or music venues.” Sounds an awful lot like the PASS system that collects and safely disseminates STI test results for adult performers.

“In the 20 years it has been in place, PASS has met, and overcome, many of the same challenges that any large-scale coronavirus testing program might encounter, from issues of keeping databases of private medical information secure, preventing the forging of test results, dealing with false positive results, and educating workers about the need for repeated testing to keep workplaces safe,” wrote McFarling. 

The PASS system—which is the result of decades of ever-evolving best practices—shuts down production the moment an active performer tests positive, then tracks down and tests that performer’s recent sexual partners. And it has also kept adult performers safe from on-set transmission of HIV for the past sixteen years. Meanwhile, noted the Daily Mail’s Natalie Rahhal, “In 2018 alone, 37,832 people in the US as a whole contracted HIV.” 

“Part of what protects performers and society at large is that we have a heavily tested population so the risk of [infection] coming in at all is very low,” the FSC’s Mike Stabile told the Daily Mail. That type of widespread testing is what the U.S. (and the rest of the world) need to establish in order to safely reopen. “Officials are trying to work out how to test people and trace their contacts efficiently, without violating privacy laws,” wrote Rahhal. “The porn industry has created a well-oiled machine to do exactly that.”

Journalists aren’t the only ones noticing how effective the PASS system is—researchers, AIDS experts, and other scientists are interested in what porn has to offer in the coronavirus era, too. “In many ways, what [the adult industry] are doing is a model for what we are trying to do with Covid,” Ashish Jha, a physician who directs Harvard University’s Global Health Institute, told McFarling. “What the adult film industry has produced has worked, and really could be the kind of tool we need…People can’t get distracted because it’s from a business they don’t approve of.”

Still, Stabile told the Daily Mail, nobody has asked pornographers for their input on widespread coronavirus testing just yet. “I would recommend that they do so, but we’re fairly stigmatized industry and I think they might be embarrassed,” he told the Daily Mail. “They shouldn’t be, because this is something we know so much about. We try to separate morals and politics in that discussion [of safety] because the more those play a part, the less effective the recommendations are going to be.”