You may need a COVID vaccine passport to travel in 2021 – CBS Miami

MIAMI (CBSMiami / CNN) – For people to travel in 2021, they may eventually need a COVID vaccine passport.

A number of technology companies and organizations have begun developing smartphone apps or systems for individuals to upload details of their COVID-19 tests and vaccines, creating digital certificates that can be shown to go live. -into venues, stadiums, movie theaters, offices, or even countries.

The General Trust Network, a Geneva-based not-for-profit enterprise, 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 health systems. across the United States and the Aruba government.

The CommonPass app created by the organization allows users to upload medical data such as the COVID-19 test result or, ultimately, a vaccine test by a hospital or medical professional, generating a health certificate or passing in the form of a QR code that shows authorities without disclosing sensitive information. For travel, the app lists health pass requirements at the departure and arrival points based on your schedule.

“You can be tested every time you cross a border. You can’t get the vaccine every time you cross a border, ”Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for Project Commons, told CNN Business. He emphasized the need for a transferable set of certificates, or a “digital yellow card,” referring to the paper document provided as proof of vaccination.

Big tech companies are also getting into the act. IBM has developed their own app, called Digital Health Pass, which allows companies and institutions to have the signals they need for access including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccine records. Certificates that match these tokens will be stored in a portable wallet.

In an effort to address one challenge of returning to normalcy after vaccines have been widely distributed, developers may now have to face other challenges, from privacy issues to different efficacy production of different vaccines. But perhaps the most important challenge to avoiding the infamous implementation and mixed success of a previous tech effort to address a public health crisis is: contact detection apps.

Early in the pandemic, Apple and Google sidelined their smartphone competitor to 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 were also developing and using their own apps.

“I think where a message of exposure was going into some of the challenges there was a gradual increase in implementation options, a lack of federal leadership… where each state had to go it alone and so all state independently, ”said Jenny Wanger, who is leading the disclosure campaigns for the Linux Foundation Public Health, a technically focused organization helping public health authorities around the world fight against COVID-19.

To encourage better coordination this time around, The Linux Foundation has partnered with the COVID-19 Certification Initiative, a gathering of more than 300 people representing dozens of organizations across five continents and they are also working with IBM and CommonPass to help develop a universal set of standards for vaccine credit apps.

“If we are successful, you should say: I have a vaccination certificate on my phone that I received when I received the vaccine in one country, with a complete set of its own health management practices… that I use to get on a plane to a completely different country and then I was given vaccine credit in that new country so I could go to that indoor concert where there was only attendance for them who have confirmed that they have been vaccinated, ”said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

“It should be interactive in the same way that email is interactive, in the same way that the web is interactive,” he said. “Right now, we are in a position where there are some moving parts that will bring us closer to that, but I think there is a genuine commitment from everyone in the industry. ”

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Part of ensuring widespread use for vaccine licenses is to account for a large subset of the world’s population who do not yet use or have access to smartphones. A few companies within the COVID-19 Certification Initiative are also developing a smart card that strikes a middle ground between the traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that is easier to store and reproduce.

“For us it is [about] how that digital credit can be stored, displayed, not only through smartphones but also in other ways for those who do not have access to stable internet and also who do not have smartphones, ”he said. Lucy Yang, co-director of the COVID-19 Certification Initiative. “We’re looking into it, and there are companies that are doing promising work.

As soon as they pick up a vaccine passport, companies need to make sure people are comfortable using it. That means addressing concerns about the handling of private medical information.

CommonPass, IBM and the Linux Foundation have all placed an emphasis on privacy at the heart of their campaigns. IBM says it allows users to control and allow them to use their health data and allows them to provide the level of detail they want to give to authorities.

“Trust and transparency are still very important when developing a platform like digital health passport, or any solution that handles sensitive personal information,” the company said in a blog post. “Putting privacy first is an important priority for managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times. ”

With vaccines manufactured by several companies across several countries at different stages of development, there are many variables that passport manufacturers need to take into account.

“The point of entry – whatever that is the limit, whatever that is in place – is to find out, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, have you had the Chinese vaccine, so they can decide accordingly, ”said Crampton. The difference can be wide: the vaccine developed by Chinese state pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, has an 86% efficacy against COVID-19, while the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna with an efficiency of about 95%.

It is also unclear how effective the vaccines are in stopping the spread of the virus, says Dr Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So even if a vaccine passport app shows that you received the bullet, it may not be a guarantee that you will safely attend an event or get on a flight.

“We still don’t know if people who have been vaccinated can get an infection or not,” she told CNN Business. “Until that is clarified, we will not know if ‘passports’ will be effective.”

However, Behlendorf expects the release and acceptance of vaccine licenses to happen relatively quickly when all else fails and a number of apps that can work together are expected to be “widely available” side by side. within the first half of 2021.

“Certainly the nerds are on it,” he said.

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