Several companies and technology groups have started developing applications or systems for smartphones for individuals to upload details of their COVID-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital credentials that can be shown to enter concert halls, stadiums, cinemas, offices or even even countries.
The Common Trust Network, an initiative by the non-profit organization The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum, has partnered with several airlines, including Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, as well as hundreds of systems in the United States and the government of Aruba.
The CommonPass application created by the group allows users to upload medical data as a result of a COVID-19 test or, eventually, a vaccination voucher by a hospital or medical professional, generating a health certificate or ticket in the form of a QR code that can be shown to the authorities without revealing confidential information. For travel, the app lists the health pass requirements at the departure and arrival points based on your itinerary.
“You can be tested every time you cross a border. You cannot be vaccinated every time you cross a border,” said Thomas Crampton, director of marketing and communications for The Commons Project, to CNN Business. He stressed the need for a set of simple and easily transferable credentials, or “digital yellow card”, referring to the paper document usually issued as proof of vaccination.
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Big tech companies are also taking action. IBM has developed its own application, called the Digital Health Pass, which allows companies and locations to customize the indicators they need to enter, including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccination records. The credentials corresponding to these indicators are stored in a mobile wallet.
In an effort to face a challenge around returning to normal after vaccines are widely distributed, developers may now have to face other challenges, ranging from privacy issues to representing the varying effectiveness of different vaccines. But the most urgent challenge may be simply to avoid the disjointed implementation and mixed success of the technology’s previous attempt to deal with the public health crisis: contact tracking applications.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Apple and Google set aside their rivalry with smartphones to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users if they had been exposed to someone with COVID-19. Many countries and state governments around the world have also developed and used their own applications.
“I think where exposure reporting encountered some challenges was more in fragmented implementation choices, lack of federal leadership … where each state had to act alone and each state had to figure this out independently,” said Jenny Wanger, who leads exposure notification initiatives for the Linux Foundation Public Health, a technology-focused organization that helps public health officials around the world to combat COVID-19.
To encourage better coordination this time, The Linux Foundation has partnered with the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative, a collective of more than 300 people representing dozens of organizations on five continents and is also working with IBM and CommonPass to help develop a set of universal standards for vaccine credential applications.
“If we are successful, you should be able to say: I have a vaccination certificate on my phone that I received when I was vaccinated in a country, with a whole set of health management practices … that I used to fly to. a totally different country and so I presented in that new country a vaccination credential so I could go to that show that was happening at home and whose presence was limited to those who demonstrated that they had the vaccine, “said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Linux Foundation .
“It must be interoperable in the same way that email is interoperable, in the same way that the web is interoperable,” he said. “At the moment, we are in a situation where there are some moving parts that bring us closer to this, but I think there is a sincere commitment from everyone in the industry.”
Part of ensuring the wide use of vaccine passports is responsible for the large subset of the global population who do not yet use or have access to smartphones. Some companies within the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that strikes a compromise between traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that is easier to store and reproduce.
“For us it is [about] how this digital credential can be stored, it can be presented, not only through smartphones, but also in other ways to those people who do not have stable internet access and who do not have smartphones, “said Lucy Yang, co-leader of COVID-19 credentials initiative. “We are investigating and there are companies that are doing really promising work.
After creating a passport for the vaccine, companies will need to make sure that people feel comfortable using it. This means facing concerns about the handling of private medical information.
CommonPass, IBM and Linux Foundation have emphasized privacy as central to their initiatives. IBM says it allows users to control and consent to the use of their health data and allows them to choose the level of detail they want to provide to authorities.
“Trust and transparency remain critical when developing a platform such as a digital health passport or any solution that addresses sensitive personal information,” the company said in a blog. “Putting privacy first is an important priority for managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times.”
With vaccines manufactured by several companies in several countries at different stages of development, there are many variables that passport manufacturers should consider.
“An entry point – be it a border, be it a location – is going to want to know if you received the vaccine from Pfizer, received the Russian vaccine, received the Chinese vaccine, so that they can make a decision accordingly,” said Crampton. The variation can be great: the vaccine developed by the Chinese state pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, is 86% effective against COVID-19, while Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are around 95% effective each.
It is also unclear how effective vaccines are at stopping transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, a specialist in infectious diseases at Stanford University. Therefore, although a vaccine passport application shows that you have received the injection, it may not be a guarantee that you will safely attend an event or board a flight.
“We still don’t know whether vaccinated people can transmit the infection or not,” she told CNN Business. “Until this is cleared up, we will not know whether ‘passports’ will be effective.”
Still, Behlendorf predicts that the launch and adoption of vaccine passports will happen quickly once everything is in place and expects a variety of applications that can work with each other to be “widely available” in the first half of 2021.
“Rest assured, the nerds are working on it,” he said.
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