Denmark pinns hopes on a Covid-19 vaccination passport

(CNN) – Like many countries around the world, Denmark is desperate to reopen parts of its economy frozen by the pandemic.

The kingdom of less than six million people has become one of Europe’s most efficient vaccine distributors and aims to offer a vaccine to its entire population by June.

Morten Bødskov, Denmark’s interim finance minister, last week raised the possibility that a so-called coronavirus passport could be introduced later this month.

“Denmark is still hit hard by the corona pandemic,” he said. “But there are parts of Danish society that need to move on and a business community that needs to be able to travel.”

Since then, the government has indicated that the February deadline may be ambitious, but the relatively small Scandinavian country may still become the first in the world to formally embrace technology to open its borders in this controversial way.

‘This is fundamental’

With exports suffering and crucial trade operations stuck in limbo, Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said the move is vital to keep Denmark ahead of the game – even if the country is in a blockade until 28 February .

As one of the most digitized countries in the world, Denmark is in an ideal position to become a testing ground for this new technology, drawing on public and private collaboration, says Kofod.

“This is fundamental because if we want to export and commercialize again, to see entrepreneurs meet again, things like the Corona passport are fundamental for this to happen,” he says.

The time is ending

Lars Ramme Nielsen, of the Danish Chamber of Commerce, also advocates the rapid adoption of the technology, saying that time is of the essence.

“If we do nothing, if we sit and wait, nothing will happen,” he told CNN. “If you start when Covid-19 has left the partnership, it will be too late. With this project we are very sure that we will have a summer of joy, football, music. So it is better to start earlier, now, to plan. “

Despite the apparent imminence of this attempt to unblock its borders, Denmark is currently living under its strictest Covid-19 blockade so far, amid heightened concerns about the spread of the Kent strain of the virus identified in the UK.

This means that anyone entering the country must produce a negative Covid test and quarantine upon arrival. Restaurants, bars and hairdressers are all closed, with meetings of more than five people prohibited.

The European football championships, which Denmark will host this summer, look like a very distant prospect.

So how will Denmark’s Covid-19 “passport” work?

There are at least four ready-made solutions largely based on two types of technology. One depends on remote cloud servers, where information is stored in droves. The other uses blockchain, a more complicated system that could be better for protecting privacy.

Since personal medical data is so confidential, it is a complicated decision. That is why many European nations covered by strict EU privacy laws seem desperate for someone to go first.

Digital toolbox

The high level of investment in the development of Covid’s passport systems indicates high optimism in the private sector that they will become a common way to open borders.

The International Air Transport Association has been working on one since the end of 2020. Others with options ready to go include the nonprofit Commons Project Foundation, the computing giant IBM and the secure identification company Clear.

Some of these applications – such as the CommonPass designed for the Commons Project cloud – are already being used to a limited extent by airlines.

IBM, which has had a worldwide team working on its “Digital Health Pass” for nine months, uses QR codes that can be updated to reveal all kinds of medical data that can be useful as the pandemic progresses.

“This is a global initiative and we put it in a toolbox for any government to use,” said Carsten Storner, from IBM Denmark. “It’s not just about vaccines. We open to store all the relevant data for Covid-19. It’s also the results of your tests, your antigen test and who knows what the future will represent in terms of variants.”

Denmark’s planned passport would be launched first for business travelers, eager to rekindle trade with foreign markets, which account for a third of its GDP.

Mette Dobel, regional president of cement and mining firm FLSmidth, knows how crucial it is for her team to hit the road to open new markets and maintain relationships with existing customers.

“We are a business that cannot be conducted through an online store,” she told CNN. “Face-to-face dialogue, especially on generally relatively large projects, is necessary. We have 300 people in Denmark who travel all the time. We need our people to travel.”

Once the business sector is up and running, the hope is that Denmark’s mass hospitality and entertainment sectors will be able to adopt the coronavirus passport.

Dividing society

With a strong digital culture, Denmark can be the perfect testing ground for this new technology.

But not everyone welcomes the concept, and there are fears that it could create a two-tier society that harms the unvaccinated.

“I am against it because I am breastfeeding. I think that the passport will make it very difficult for those who do not have or do not want to have the vaccine to navigate in society. I’m going to split into a team A and a team B, “she says.

Peder Hvelplund, an elected official and health spokesman for the political group Aliança Vermelha-Verde, asks why the country cannot wait until everyone is immunized in the summer, which is only a few months away.

“The question is whether it really makes sense,” he says. “The more people we vaccinate, the more the reproduction rate will fall. It is in the business’s interest to reopen for everyone and allow as many people as possible to take advantage of it.”

Business leaders are divided on the issue.

Commercial agencies are lobbying for a passport scheme as quickly as possible, but restaurant owners like Philip Helgstrand, owner of Restaurant Strandhotellet in Dragoer, a port city south of Copenhagen, are dissatisfied.

Helgstrand says it is not feasible for small businesses to be responsible for verifying and manipulating each customer’s Covid data, especially for travelers from abroad, such as cruise ship passengers who previously represented a large portion of their pre-pandemic customers. .

“I don’t think it’s fair for us to go and ask everyone to come into the restaurant,” he says. “We already have to ask, ‘Do you have a mask? You don’t feel very close to this and that. ‘ It should be up to border control and the police to see the passport. “

These arguments are not exclusive to Denmark.

Last year, advocacy group Privacy International warned that vaccine launches “should not be seen opportunistically as yet another data capture”, warning that “until everyone has access to an effective vaccine, such passports for entry into service will be unfair “.

There are also concerns about how Covid passports could work globally.

After messing up the acquisition and deployment of coronavirus vaccines, the EU’s next crisis could focus on how to standardize immunization records to safeguard the most central of the bloc’s principles: the Schengen agreement on freedom of movement.

If each country takes a different approach to adopting a Covid-19 passport and chooses different systems, things can get complicated quickly.

International project

The way in which each member state views the matter appears to be affected by that state of its finances.

Greece, which faced a 70% loss of its tourism revenue last year, is planning a passport to Covid, as is Sweden. Hungary and Poland also have some kind of digital immunity documentation in progress.

Europe’s most powerful countries, Germany and France, have yet to support such an initiative, despite similar laws already in place for other viral diseases, such as yellow fever.

In a new Brexited from Britain, where more than 14 million people have already received their first dose of a vaccine, the passport concept for coronavirus has received little support, although it is still being debated.

Denmark is aware that part of the success of its passport will depend on whether other countries actually recognize it and not just within the EU bloc.

“Of course, it is important that there is recognition of the passport in other countries and that the job has to guarantee that now,” said Kofod, Denmark’s foreign minister.

Lars Sandahl Sørensen, of the Danish Industry Confederation, sees space for the UN and WHO to get involved in some kind of certification process. Without that, he says, Denmark will not have what it needs to survive.

“Denmark is a nation that deals and trades with the rest of the world,” he says. “We live on this interaction with the world, so it prevents a society like the Danish one.

“We want this to be an international project. We want to be able to interact with other countries. But we started in Denmark to show that it can be done – mobility within the country, but also outside.”