Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., and Salesforce.com Inc. has teamed up with a consortium aimed at creating a digital COVID-19 vaccine passport to make travel safer after a pandemic.
The Vaccine Credit Initiative, announced today, also includes several health care organizations such as the nonprofit Mayo Clinic. They hope governments and airlines will start asking people to show they are protected against the COVID-19 virus before they can travel.
The idea is to create a type of digital passport that will be able to store an encrypted copy of a person’s vaccine certificates. The VCI has recommended that anyone with a smartphone receive paper printed QR codes containing authentication certificates to enable safer travel.
“The aim of the Vaccine Credit Initiative is to empower people with digital access to their vaccine records,” said Paul Meyer, chief nonprofit officer of the Commons Project, who is also a member of the consortium. He said the technology would allow people to “safely return to travel, work, school and life, while protecting the confidentiality of their data.”
The VCI intends to use an existing specification called SMART Health Cards in line with W3C and HL7 FHIR Certification Certificate standards designed to allow people to store medical records in a digital wallet such as Apple Wallet or Google Pay.
It remains to be seen whether a digital vaccine passport will ever be necessary for regional or international travel, however. There are also questions about how the scheme would be implemented. Some people in the U.S. have already received paper cards that record their COVID-19 vaccine jobs, and it’s unclear how they would move those records to digital status.
In addition, some countries are going ahead with models based on existing vaccine documents that some countries need to get in, such as vaccines for diseases such as yellow fever and polio. . There are also ethical questions about whether someone who proves they are vaccinated should have more freedom than someone who cannot.
Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, in this case, said that he believes that health concerns outweigh any ethical or privacy concerns. He told SiliconANGLE that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed a major problem because silos tend to contain health information, which has severely hampered the international response.
“Because we know that some superstitious people do not show signs and that places where people gather, such as airports, can be deadly if one of these masses gets in,” it is essential to identify and prevent these people, ”said Enderle. “I see a tool like this being essential for ensuring better virus spread and more effective mitigation, especially internationally.”
Mike Sicilia, vice president of Oracle’s global business units, takes the same view, arguing that digital access to people’s medical records will be critical to resuming safe international travel.
“This process has to be as easy as online banking,” Sicilia said. “We are committed to working with technology and the medical communities, as well as global governments, to ensure that people have secure access to this information where they need it.”
Photo: torstensimon / Pixabay
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