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Vaccine passports may soon be available to help people get their lives back – but they face many scientific, social and political obstacles to be accepted.
The big picture: Reliable and accessible proof of the vaccine-induced protection against the novel coronavirus could accelerate international travel and economic reopening, but the obstacles to its large-scale adoption are so great that it may never fully happen.
Driving the news: The secure digital identity app CLEAR and CommonPass, a healthcare app that allows users to access vaccination records and COVID-19 test results, will work together to provide a vaccination passport service, reports my colleague from ‘Axios Erica Pandey.
- The news comes as a growing number of countries and companies are considering introducing similar vaccine passports that could help the safe return to normal life and travel as quickly as possible.
- “To restart the economy, to save some industries, I think you need a solution like this,” said Eric Piscini, vice president at IBM who oversaw the development of the new health passport application. of the company, to the New York Times.
Yes, but: There are many health, ethical and operational issues that need to be resolved before vaccine passports can become an effective part of daily life.
Health: Medical experts still don’t know how effective vaccinations – or exposure to the virus – are in preventing the transmission of COVID-19.
- While the CDC is set to release new guidance on social activity for fully vaccinated people soon, current recommendations still call on them to continue wearing masks and practicing social distancing.
- Until it is clear that vaccination effectively prevents transmission, there is a limit to the usefulness of a vaccination passport for public health – especially if emerging variants make some vaccines less protective.
- “The usefulness of a vaccine passport is only as good as proof of the duration of immunity,” David Salisbury, associate member of the Chatham House think tank, told Bloomberg. “You might end up with a tampon in your passport that lasts longer than the antibodies in your blood.”
Ethics: The most obvious use case for vaccine passports is for international travel, which has been crippled by heavy quarantine restrictions. But such a system risks locking out billions of people who cannot or do not want to be vaccinated.
- The EU has discussed creating a vaccine passport, with tourism-dependent countries like Greece leading the charge. But Germany and France – where vaccine rollout has been low and hesitation is high – have reservations, and such a system appears to be months away.
- Of greater ethical concern are the many people in developing countries who may not have access to vaccines of any kind for months, or even years, as rich countries pile up supplies.
- And if vaccine passports are used not only for international travel, but to enable people to work and engage in social life at the national level, they could create extremely unequal barriers that could paradoxically reinforce reluctance to vaccination.
Operational: Passports for international travel are regulated by governments and have decades of history behind them, but there is no unified system for vaccine passports, which are introduced by governments and companies with different standards, this which makes it a target of fraud.
- The United States in particular has a decentralized medical system which can make it difficult for people to easily access their health records, especially if they lack digital literacy.
- “I can pretty much 100% guarantee that fraud will happen,” says Jane Lee, Trust and Security Architect at cybersecurity firm Sift. “We’re going to have a lot of bad actors where they claim to offer a service that will provide some sort of vaccination passport, but it’s really a phishing campaign.”
Be smart: None of these obstacles are insurmountable on their own. But as we have seen with the failures of digital contact tracing, just because a technological solution exists does not mean that it will be effective or adopted by the public.
- “There’s a huge motivation for this to work socially,” says Kevin Trilli, product manager at Onfido, an identity verification company. “But there are a lot of government issues that are really going to make the system difficult to implement.”
- There is also time pressure at work here, especially in the United States, where vaccination rates have increased. The more people who are vaccinated, the less useful it will be to create a complex system to separate those who are protected from those who are not.
The bottom line: Some form of vaccine visa will likely be introduced for international travel, but it seems unlikely that they will become a passport to resume normal life.
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