A coalition of healthcare and technology 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 vaccination records digitally. As people are starting to get vaccinated against COVID-19, they may need to prove they are vaccinated before they can return to work, school or travel, and having an easy-to-access digital vaccination record can help with that. The coalition calls itself the Vaccination Credential 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 similarly verifiable credentials.
VCI says it is working to make credentials using the SMART Health Cards specification, which is designed to allow people to store immunizations or laboratory results in a digital wallet. (More information about the specification is also available on GitHub.)
But the VCI press release does not provide a timeline for when organizations that administer the COVID-19 vaccines will be able to make these records, so it is unclear when you will be able to actually add one to a digital wallet. And with people in the United States already receiving paper cards recording when they receive their COVID-19 vaccines, it is unclear how these records would be transferred to VCI’s digital standard, if they can.
Another obstacle could be the participation of health centers, as some providers may have more resources to incorporate these credentials into the vaccination process than others. And there are also ethical questions about whether a person who can prove he has been vaccinated should have more freedom than someone who is not.
VCI is not the first coalition to consider a digital vaccination record COVID-19. Similar efforts are being modeled on existing vaccine documents already required by some countries for entry. (These documents document vaccines for diseases such as yellow fever or polio.) An initiative by Estonia and the World Health Organization began developing a digital vaccine certificate COVID-19 in October.