Vaccination credentials - popularly called “vaccine passports” - are here and ready to be deployed.
As more and more Americans receive COVID-19 vaccines, we move closer and closer to resuming normal travel, recreation, and business activities. But protecting public health during the re-opening process requires a clear understanding of individual health and vaccination status.
That’s where vaccination credentials come in. Secure, verifiable credentials that provide proof of health and vaccination status, and which are linked to unique identities, are a critical tool in the collective response to COVID-19.
This need demands innovative, technology-enabled solutions that solve for some of the shortcomings of current management and credentialing systems, and which create a secure, equitable, and sustainable system going forward.
“Like any other credential, the more it gains in value - the more needed it is - then you’re going to have people creating fraudulent versions, trying to work around the system,” Karen Gardner, CMO at SICPA North America, recently told an audience at the Association of State and Territorial Health Organizations (ASTHO) COVID-19 TechXpo.
Gardner pointed to the current “yellow card” credential used in many international settings, which is non-secure and heavily frauded. To this point, the U.S. has not needed to rely on similar credentials within its borders, because of the strength of existing public health systems, but COVID-19 has created an unprecedented need for visibility into individual health and vaccination status.
New credentials, Gardner said, must be “trusted, they need to be immutable - meaning they cannot be tampered with or faked, they should be privacy-preserving and inclusive, so that anyone has access to get their own credentials in their control.” The credentials should be backed by clear, centralized data, and the key features should carry through both digital and physical credentials.
SICPA has partnered with a number of other leading companies to leverage its expertise providing security for documents, credentials, and other regulated products as part of a comprehensive system for issuing, managing, and verifying health and vaccination status.
The updated solution creates a seamless, highly interoperable system for public health officials to manage vaccine credentials and use them to effectively protect public health, while answering potential privacy and equity concerns.
Key to addressing privacy concerns is implementing solutions that allow for vaccination credentials that can be trusted and verified without directly sharing or tracking personal data to meet the requirements for the activity or access, such as entry into another country or eliminating the need for quarantine. The verifier doesn’t need to know your name, birthdate, address, health background. They just need to be able to confirm 3 things:
Along the same lines, ensuring equity requires an intentional approach. We cannot implement digital solutions that are only available through smart phones – paper or card based options will still be required, but that doesn’t mean that the paper and card based options can’t benefit from the digital security that allows for trusted, verifiable credentials. And anyone should be able to easily get their own vaccination credential in an accepted, verifiable format. Centralizing the issuance - through state public health agencies, for example - helps with this so there is not a reliance on every healthcare provider having the access to or investing in technology solutions.
As long as we have infectious diseases that are active and can spread the way COVID-19 did this past year, we can benefit from strong vaccination credentials to ensure public health. Key security and accessibility innovations can ensure that these credentials are resistant to counterfeiting, effectively protect individual privacy, and provide clear, relevant, and verifiable information - which can be used to ascertain individual health and vaccination status, and hasten our return to normal.
Pfizer CEO says a THIRD Covid vaccine dose will be needed as soon as six months | Daily Mail Online