A new term has been added to the vocabulary of the travel industry: vaccine passport. The travel industry will have to accommodate this change globally.
1. What is a vaccine passport?
The concept is supposed to be a digital documentation that shows that passengers have been vaccinated against the coronavirus. It’s basically an all-in-one digital version of all the required documents you’d need for travel during the COVID pandemic. Japan will roll out a system like this in the coming weeks.
2. This is not a completely original idea
Something like this has been done before. Travelers who were going to certain countries had to prove, for decades now, that they were vaccinated against certain diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, and ebola. After being inoculated, travelers would often receive a signed and stamped “yellow card” known as an International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis, which the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) strongly recommends people to take on relevant trips. “Everybody who has traveled internationally to countries that require vaccination against malaria, diphtheria, and other things has had yellow cards,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation Public Health, a technological organization that assists health authorities against the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, the major difference between the yellow card back then and the vaccine passport now is that the latter is designed to be digital as today, it’s more convenient to have everything available online or on a smartphone. The goal is to make the digital vaccine record easy to use to book a flight or a hotel and it should work like email.
3. It isn’t something you can develop quickly
According to Drummond Reed, a chief trust officer for Evernym, “The global passport system took 50 years to develop. Even when they wanted to add biometrics to make it stronger, it took over a decade to agree on just how you’re going to add a fingerprint or a facial biometric to be verified on a passport. Now, in a very short period of time, we need to produce a digital credential that can be as universally recognized as a passport and it needs an even greater level of privacy because it’s going to be digital.”
Additionally, it would also be necessary to develop ethical technology that would not store users’ data and track where they are. This needs to be taken into consideration even though it is possible to rush tech solutions like this, according to travel industry experts and technology developers.
4. Seven countries in the European Union are now accepting digital vaccine passports
On June 1st, 2021, the digital vaccine passport system went live in 7 EU countries. The document is called a “digital green certificate” and it states whether the holder is one of the following: fully vaccinated against COVID-19, made a full recovery from the virus, or tested negative within the last 72 hours. Consequently, travelers who are either one of those will not be required to go through testing or quarantine. The countries that have this digital vaccine passport are: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, and Poland. This certificate is a QR code that can be scanned whenever needed and is stored on a mobile phone or printed out on a piece of paper. Like most private technological features, the data is only stored on the phone and not on any server, for privacy reasons.
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