Vaccine passports could soon become available to help people get back to life – but they it faces many scientific, social and political barriers to acceptance.
The whole picture: Reliable and affordable evidence of vaccine-induced protection against the new coronavirus could accelerate international travel and economic reopening, but the obstacles to its widespread adoption are so great that it may never be fully achieved.
News management: The secure digital identity application CLEAR and CommonPass, a health application that allows users to access vaccination records and COVID-19 test results, will work together to provide a vaccine passport service, says my Axios colleague Erica Pandey.
- The news comes as an increasing number of countries and companies are discussing plans to introduce similar vaccine passports, which could help protect people return to normal life and travel as soon as possible.
- “To revive the economy, to save certain industries, I think you need a solution like this,” Eric Piscini, IBM’s vice president who oversaw the development of the company’s new health passport application, told the New York Times.
Yes but: There are many health, ethical and operational issues that need to be addressed before vaccine passports can become an effective part of everyday life.
Health: Medical experts still do not fully know how effective vaccinations – or exposure to the virus – are in preventing the subsequent transmission of COVID-19.
- While the CDC will soon launch new guidelines for social work for fully vaccinated people, the current recommendations still require them to continue wearing masks and practicing social distancing.
- Until it is clear that vaccination effectively prevents 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 the vaccine passport is as good as proof of how long the immunity lasts,” David Salisbury, an associate at the Chatham House think tank, told Bloomberg. “You could find yourself with 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 affected by onerous quarantine restrictions. But such a system risks blocking billions of people who cannot or do not want to receive the vaccine.
- The EU has discussed the creation of a vaccine passport, and tourism-dependent countries such as Greece are leading the charge. But Germany and France – where vaccine launches have been slow and hesitation is high – have reservations and any such system appears to be a few months away.
- A greater ethical concern is the many people in developing countries who cannot access vaccines of any kind for months or even years while rich nations accumulate supplies.
- And if vaccine passports are not only used for international travel, but to allow people to work and engage in social life domestically, they could create unequal barriers that could paradoxically strengthen the vaccine’s hesitation.
Operational: Passports for international travel are regulated by governments and have decades of history behind them, but there is no such unified system for vaccine passports, which are introduced by governments and businesses of different standards, making them a target for fraud.
- The US, in particular, has a decentralized medical system that can make it difficult for people to access their healthcare records, especially if they lack digital literacy.
- “I can almost guarantee 100% fraud,” said Jane Lee, a trusted and secure architect at cybersecurity company Sift. “We’re going to have a lot of bad actors claiming to offer a service that will provide some sort of vaccination passport, but it’s really a phishing campaign.”
Be smart: None of these obstacles are insurmountable in themselves. But as we have seen with the failures of digital contact tracking, just because there is a technological solution does not mean that it will be effective or adopted by the public.
- “There’s a huge motivation to make this work socially,” says Kevin Trilli, product manager at Onfido, an identification verification company. “But there are a lot of government issues that will really make the system difficult to implement.”
- There is time pressure at work here as well, 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 that requires the unprotected protégé.
Bottom line: Some forms of vaccine visas will probably be introduced for international travel, but it seems unlikely to become a passport to resume normal life.