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.

Several companies and technology groups have begun developing smartphone applications or systems for individuals to upload details of their COVID-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital credentials that could be displayed to enter concert venues. stadiums, cinemas, offices or even countries. .

The Common Trust Network, an initiative of the Geneva nonprofit, The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum, has collaborated 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 application created by the group allows users to upload medical data, such as the result of the COVID-19 test or, finally, a proof of vaccination by a hospital or a medical professional, generating a health certificate or pass in the form a QR code that can be presented to the authorities without disclosing sensitive information. For travel, the app lists the requirements for health permits at points of departure and arrival based on your itinerary.

“You can be tested every time you cross a border. You can’t be vaccinated every time you cross a border, “Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for The Commons Project, told CNN Business. He emphasized the need for a simple and easy-to-transfer set of accreditations or a “digital yellow card”, referring to the paper document generally issued as proof of vaccination.

Large technology companies are also taking action. IBM has developed its own application, called the Digital Health Pass, that allows companies and locations to customize the indicators they would need for entry, including coronavirus testing, temperature checks and vaccination records. The credentials corresponding to these indicators are then stored in a mobile wallet.

In an effort to address a challenge to return to normalcy after vaccines are widely distributed, developers may now need to address other challenges, from privacy issues to the various efficacies of different vaccines. vaccines. But the most pressing challenge could simply be to avoid the disjoint implementation and mixed success of the previous technology attempt to address the public health crisis: contact tracking applications.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Apple and Google put aside their smartphone rivalry to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to let users know if they had been exposed to COVID-19. Many countries and state governments around the world have developed and used their own applications.

“I think if the exposure notification encountered some challenges it was more of the partial implementation options, the lack of federal leadership … where each state had to go it alone and so each state had to realize independently, ”said Jenny Wanger, who exposes exposure notification initiatives to the Linux Foundation Public Health, a technology-focused organization that helps public health authorities around the world fight COVID-19.

To encourage better coordination this time around, the Linux Foundation has partnered with the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative, a team of more than 300 people representing dozens of organizations on five continents and also working with IBM and CommonPass to helps develop a set of universal standards for vaccine accreditation applications.

“If we are successful, you should be able to say: I have a vaccine certificate on my phone that I received when I was vaccinated in a country, with a complete set of my own types of health management practices … I used to get on a plane to a completely different country and then I presented in that new country a vaccination accreditation to be able to go to that concert that was taking place indoors for which attendance was limited to those who showed that they had had the vaccine, ”said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

“It should be interoperable in the same way that email is interoperable, in the same way that the web is interoperable,” he said. “Right now, we’re in a situation where there are some moving parts that bring us closer to that, but I think there’s a sincere commitment from everyone in the industry.”

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Part of ensuring the widespread use of vaccine passports is to represent the large subset of the global population that does not yet use or have access to smartphones. Several COVID-19 Accreditation Initiative companies are also developing a smart card that creates a middle ground between traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that is easier to store and reproduce.

“It simply came to our notice then [about] how those digital credentials can be stored can be presented, not only through smartphones, but also in other ways for those people who do not have stable internet access and also who do not have smartphones ”, said Lucy Yang, co-leader of the COVID-19 Credentials initiative. “We look at it and there are companies that do a very promising job.

Once they build a vaccine passport, companies will need to make sure people feel comfortable using it. This means addressing concerns about the treatment of private medical information.

CommonPass, IBM and the Linux Foundation have all emphasized privacy as a core element of 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 the authorities.

“Trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform such as a digital health passport or any solution that manages sensitive personal information,” the company said in a blog post. “Putting confidentiality first is an important priority for data management and analysis in response to these complex periods.”

With vaccines manufactured by several companies in several countries at different stages of development, there are a lot of variables that passport manufacturers will have to consider.

“An entry point – whether it’s a border or a place – will want to know, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, did you get the Chinese vaccine, so that they can make a decision? as a result, “Crampton said. The variation can be wide: the vaccine developed by the Chinese pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, has an efficacy of 86% against COVID-19, while the vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna each have an efficacy of about 95%.

It is also unclear how effective vaccines are at stopping the transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, a specialist in infectious diseases at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport application will show that you received the shot, it may not be a guarantee that you are safely participating in an event or boarding a flight.

“We still don’t know if vaccinated people can transmit the infection or not,” she told CNN Business. “Until this is clarified, we will not know if the ‘passports’ will be effective.”

However, Behlendorf anticipates that the launch and adoption of vaccine passports will happen fairly quickly once everything is set up and expects a variety of applications that can work with each other to be “widely available” in the first place. half of 2021.

“Be sure, the nerds are on him,” he said.

(© 2020 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved. Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner company, contributed to this report.)