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A coalition of healthcare and tech companies, which includes Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle, is working on an initiative that aims to make it easier for people to access their COVID-19 immunization records digitally. As people begin to get vaccinated against COVID-19, they may need to prove that they are vaccinated so that they can return to work, school or travel, and have an easily accessible digital vaccination record. could help them. The coalition calls itself the Vaccination Certificates Initiative (VCI).
“VCI’s vision is to enable individuals to obtain an encrypted digital copy of their immunization credentials to store in a digital wallet of their choice,” according to a press release. If you don’t want to use a smartphone, you can receive papers with QR codes containing verifiable credentials in the same way.
VCI says it is working to create the credentials using the SMART Health Cards specification, which is designed to allow people to store vaccination or lab results in a digital wallet. (More info on the specification is also available on GitHub.)
But VCI’s press release doesn’t provide a timeline as to when organizations administering COVID-19 vaccines will be able to save these records, so it’s unclear when you’ll be able to add one to a digital portfolio. And since people in the United States are already receiving paper recording cards when they receive their COVID-19 vaccines, it’s unclear how those records would be transferred to the VCI digital standard, if they can.
Another barrier could be the involvement of health centers, as some providers may have more resources to incorporate these credentials into the immunization process than others. And there are also ethical questions about whether a person who can prove they are vaccinated should have more freedoms than a person who is not.
VCI is not the first coalition to consider a digital COVID-19 vaccination record. Similar efforts build on existing vaccine documentation already required by some countries for admission. (These vaccinations document diseases like yellow fever or polio.) An effort, by Estonia and the World Health Organization, began to develop a digital certificate of COVID-19 vaccine in October.
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