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

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

Several companies and technology groups have begun to develop smartphone apps or systems that allow individuals to upload details of their COVID-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital references that can be displayed to concert halls, stadiums, cinemas, offices or even enter countries.

The Common Trust Network, an initiative of the Geneva-based nonprofit 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 in the United States and the government of Aruba.

The CommonPass app created by the group allows users to upload medical data such as a COVID-19 test result or, ultimately, a vaccination certificate by a hospital or medical professional, generating a health certificate or pass in the form of a QR code that can be shown to authorities without revealing sensitive information. For travel, the app provides an overview of the health card requirements at the departure and arrival points based on your travel schedule.

“Every time you cross a border, you can be tested. You can’t get vaccinated every time you cross the border, ”Thomas Crampton, The Commons Project’s chief of marketing and communications, told CNN Business. He stressed the need for a simple and easily transferable set of identification cards, or a ‘digital yellow card’, referring to the paper document usually issued as proof of vaccination.

Big tech companies are also getting into the act. IBM has developed its own app called Digital Health Pass, which allows businesses and locations to customize the indicators they need for access, including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccination records. Credentials corresponding to those indicators are then stored in a mobile wallet.

In an effort to address one challenge, namely returning to the norm after vaccines have been widely distributed, developers may now have to face other challenges, ranging from privacy concerns to displaying the differing effectiveness of different vaccines. But perhaps the most pressing challenge is avoiding the incoherent implementation and mixed success of tech’s earlier attempt to address the public health crisis: contacts tracking apps.

Early in the pandemic, Apple and Google set aside their smartphone rivalry to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users if they had been exposed to someone with COVID-19. Many countries and states around the world have also developed and used their own apps.

“I think where the exposure notification ran into some challenges, more were the patchy implementation choices, the lack of federal leadership … where each state had to do it on its own and so each state had to figure it out independently,” said Jenny Wanger, who leadership has exposure reporting initiatives for Linux Foundation Public Health, a technology-focused organization that helps public health authorities around the world combat COVID-19.

To encourage better coordination this time, The Linux Foundation has partnered with the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative, a collective of more than 300 people representing dozens of organizations on five continents, and is also partnering with IBM and CommonPass to help develop a range of universal standards. for vaccine reference apps.

“If we’re successful, you should be able to say, I have a vaccination certificate on my phone that I got when I was vaccinated in one country, with a whole host of health management practices of my own … that I use to get on a plane to a whole different country and then in that new country I presented vaccination records so that I could go to that concert that took place indoors and for which attendance was limited to those who demonstrated they had the vaccine, ”said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation.

“It has to be interoperable the way email is interoperable, just like the web is interoperable,” he said. “Right now we are in a situation where there are some moving parts that bring us closer, but I think everyone in the industry is genuinely committed.”

MORE FROM CBSMIAMI.COM
Florida Gov. assistant criticized for ‘disgusting’ COVID-19 tweet
Police: Rapper Splash Zanotti terrorized couple during Miramar Home Invasion
3 adults and 1 minor hospitalized after drive-by shooting in Little Haiti

Part of ensuring widespread use of vaccine passports is responsible for the large subset of the world’s population who still does not use or have access to smartphones. Some companies within the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that balances traditional paper vaccine certificates with an online version that is easier to store and reproduce.

“For us it is [about] how that digital ID can be stored can be presented not only via smartphones, but also in other ways for people who do not have access to stable internet and also do not have a smartphone, ”said Lucy Yang, COVID-19 co-lead Credentials Initiative. “We are investigating it and there are companies that are doing really promising work.

Once companies have a vaccine passport in place, they need to make sure people are comfortable using it. That means we have to be concerned about handling personal medical information.

CommonPass, IBM, and the Linux Foundation have all emphasized that privacy is central to their initiatives. IBM says it allows users to control and consent to the use of their health data and to choose the level of detail they want to provide to authorities.

“Trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform such as a digital health passport or any other solution that handles sensitive personal information,” the company said in a blog post. “Putting privacy first is a major priority in managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times.”

With vaccines manufactured by multiple companies in different countries at different stages of development, there are many variables that passport makers need to consider.

“A point of entry – whether that’s a border, or that’s a location – will want to know, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, did you get the Chinese vaccine, so they can make a decision. Accordingly, “Crampton said. The difference can be significant: the vaccine developed by the Chinese state pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, has an efficacy of 86% against COVID-19, while the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna each have an efficacy of about 95. %.

It’s also unclear how effective the vaccines are at stopping the transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport app will show you received the injection, it may not guarantee you will safely attend an event or board a flight.

“We still don’t know whether vaccinated people can transmit an infection or not,” she told CNN Business. “Until that is cleared up, we don’t know if ‘passports’ are effective.”

Still, Behlendorf expects the rollout and adoption of vaccine passports to happen fairly quickly once everything is in place and expects a variety of apps that can work together to be “generally available” in the first half of 2021.

“Don’t worry, the nerds are on it,” he said.

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