Vaccination passports may soon be available to help people resume their lives – but they facing numerous scientific, social and political barriers to acceptance.
The whole picture: Reliable and accessible evidence of vaccine-induced protection against the new coronavirus could accelerate international travel and economic reopening, but the obstacles to its large-scale acceptance are so great that it will never be possible.
Send the news: The secure digital identity app CLEAR and CommonPass, a health application that gives users access to vaccination records and COVID-19 test results, will work together to offer a passport service for vaccines, reports my Axios colleague Erica Pandey.
- The news comes as an increasing number of countries and companies are putting off plans to introduce similar vaccine passports that could help the protected people return to normal life and travel as soon as possible.
- “To restart the economy, to save certain industries, I think you need a solution like this,” said Eric Piscini, a vice president at IBM, who oversaw the development of the new health passport app of the company, told the New York Times.
Yes, but: There are numerous health, ethical and operational issues that need to be resolved before vaccine passports can become an effective part of daily life.
Health: Medical experts do not yet fully know how effective vaccinations – or exposure to the virus – are in preventing the transmission of COVID-19.
- Although the CDC will soon be releasing new clues on social activities for people who are fully vaccinated, current recommendations are still needed to wear masks and do away with social distancing.
- Until it is clear that vaccination prevents effective transmission, there is a limit to how useful any vaccine passport can be for public health – especially if emerging variants make some vaccines less protective.
- “The usefulness of a vaccine passport is just as good as proving how long the immunity lasts,” David Salisbury, a fellow fellow at the Chatham House brainstorm, told Bloomberg. “You can find a stamp in your passport that lasts longer than the antibodies in your blood.”
Ethical: The most obvious use case for vaccine passports is for international travel, which has been paralyzed by heavy quarantine restrictions. But such a system runs the risk of excluding billions of people who are unable or unwilling to get the vaccine.
- The EU has discussed the creation of a vaccine passport, with tourism-dependent countries such as Greece taking the lead. But Germany and France – where the vaccine explosion was low and hesitation is high – have reservations, and it looks like it’s been like this for months.
- A greater ethical concern is the many people in developing countries who have no access to any vaccine for months or even years, while rich countries store supplies.
- And if vaccine passports are not only used for international travel, but to enable people to practice their homes in social life, it can create crippling unequal barriers that can paradoxically reinforce the vaccine’s hesitation.
Operating: Passports for international travel are regulated by governments and have decades of history behind them, but there is no such uniform system of vaccine passports instituted by governments and businesses with different standards, which makes them a target for fraud.
- The US in particular has a decentralized medical system that can make it difficult for people to easily access their healthcare records, especially if they do not have digital literacy.
- “I can almost 100% guarantee that fraud is taking place,” said Jane Lee, a trust and security architect at cybersecurity company Sift. “We’ll have a lot of bad actors where they pretend to offer a service that offers some kind of vaccination passport, but it’s really a phishing campaign.”
Be smart: None of these obstacles are insurmountable on their own. But as we have seen with the failures of digital contact detection, it does not mean that it will be effective or accepted by the public because there is a technological solution.
- “There’s a huge motivation to make it work socially,” says Kevin Trilli, chief product officer at Onfido, a verification company. “But there are a lot of government issues that are going to make the system really difficult to implement.”
- There is also a time pressure at work here, especially in the US, where vaccination rates have risen. The more people are vaccinated, the less value there will be in creating a complex system to sift protectors against the unprotected.
The conclusion: A form of vaccine visa is likely to be introduced for international travel, but it seems unlikely that it will become a passport to resume normal life.