Vaccine passports may be available soon to help people get back to their lives – but they face numerous scientific, social and political barriers to be accepted.
The big picture: Reliable and accessible proof of vaccine-induced protection against the new coronavirus could accelerate international travel and the economic reopening, but the obstacles to its large-scale adoption are so great that they may never fully reach.
Driving the news: The secure digital identity app CLEAR and CommonPass, a health app that allows users to access vaccination records and the results of the COVID-19 test, will work together to offer a vaccine passport service, reports my Axios colleague, Erica Pandey.
- The news comes as a growing number of countries and companies are discussing plans to introduce passports of similar vaccines that could help protected people return to normal life and travel as quickly as possible.
- “To restart the economy, to save certain industries, I think you need a solution like this,” said Eric Piscini, vice president at IBM who oversaw the development of the company’s new health passport application, to the New York Times.
Yes but: There are a number of health, ethical and operational issues that need to be addressed before vaccine passports become an effective part of daily life.
Health: Medical experts still don’t fully understand how effective vaccinations – or exposure to the virus – are at preventing COVID-19 transmission.
- Although the CDC is set to launch new guidelines on social activity for fully vaccinated people soon, current recommendations still require them to continue wearing masks and practicing social detachment.
- Until it is clear that vaccination effectively prevents transmission, there is a limit to the usefulness of any vaccine passport for public health – especially if emerging variants make some vaccines less protective.
- “The usefulness of a vaccine passport is as good as evidence of how long immunity lasts,” David Salisbury, an associate member of the think tank Chatham House, told Bloomberg. “You could end up with a stamp in your passport that lasts longer than the antibodies in your blood.”
Ethical: The most obvious use case for vaccine passports is for international travel, which has been hampered by costly quarantine restrictions. But such a system risks blocking billions of people who cannot or do not want to get the vaccine.
- The EU has been discussing the creation of a vaccine passport, with tourism-dependent countries like Greece leading the way. But Germany and France – where vaccine release has been low and hesitation is high – have reservations, and any such system appears to be months away.
- A major ethical concern is the many people in developing countries who may not have access to vaccines of any kind for months or even years while rich countries accumulate supplies.
- And if vaccine passports are not only used for international travel, but to allow people to work and get involved in domestic social life, they can create uneven barriers that can paradoxically reinforce vaccination hesitation.
Operational: Passports for international travel are regulated by governments and have decades of history, but there is no such unified system for vaccine passports, which are being introduced by governments and companies with different standards, making them targets of fraud.
- The United States, in particular, has a decentralized medical system that can make it difficult for people to easily access health records, especially if they lack digital knowledge.
- “I can guarantee almost 100% that the fraud will occur,” says Jane Lee, a trusted and security architect at cybersecurity company Sift. “We will have many malefactors pretending to offer a service that will provide some type of vaccination passport, but it is actually a phishing campaign.”
Be smart: None of these obstacles is insurmountable in itself. But, as we have seen with the flaws in digital contact tracking, just because there is a technological solution does not mean that it will be effective or adopted by the public.
- “There is great motivation to make this work socially,” says Kevin Trilli, product director at Onfido, an ID verification company. “But there are a number of government issues that are really going to make the system difficult to implement.”
- There is time pressure at work here too, especially in the United States, where vaccination rates have increased. The more people are vaccinated, the less value there will be in creating a complex system to separate the protected from the unprotected.
The end result: Some form of vaccine visa is likely to be introduced for international travel, but it seems unlikely that it will become a passport for returning to normal life.