User:BushelCandle/COVID-19 Vaccine Passport

A COVID-19 Vaccine Passport (also known by many other names in different jurisdictions) is a verifiable record of immunization certifying an individual has received a COVID-19 vaccine.

It is vitally important that a COVID-19 Vaccine Passport be verifiable since it may then allow preferential and differentiated access to businesses, events, services and travel. This verifiability distinguishes a COVID-19 Vaccine Passport from a mere COVID-19 vaccine card. COVID-19 Vaccine Passports are also distinguishable from immunity passports or certificates or health passes which may certify immunity acquired by a variety of routes other than vaccination.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, passports were seen as a potential way to contain the pandemic and permit faster economic recovery. Despite the benefits of vaccination in ameliorating economic and social problems caused by the pandemic, issuing COVID-19 vaccine passports has raised scientific, ethical and legal issues.

In some jurisdictions such as France, Italy and Canada where vaccine passports were introduced for COVID-19, vaccine uptake increased.

History and background
Many governments including Finland and Germany have expressed early interest in the concept. In February 2021, Israel implemented a "green pass" system, which allowed those who are fully vaccinated to eat at restaurants, attend concerts, and travel to other nations such as Egypt, Cyprus and Greece.

Canada
Thus far, the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador have announced plans or already implemented a provincial vaccine passport.

China
In February 2020, China started to use digital "health codes", available on a variety of platforms including WeChat and Alipay with scannable QR barcodes displaying a "traffic light" system of colours to enter public transport, shops, restaurants and malls. It was used 40 billion times between February and March.

In March 2021, an "International Travel Health Certificate" was created. In March 2021, the government of China rolled out the world's first COVID-19 vaccine passport system through a partnership with Alipay and WeChat. The system provides a health certificate that includes an individual's vaccine status and the results of COVID-19 testing. Initially, the system would only indicate that an individual had been vaccinated if they received a Chinese-made coronavirus vaccine, leading to criticism, though by April 2021 the system began to accept records of receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Janssen vaccines. As of March 2021, the app was optional and its use was restricted to Chinese citizens. The digital health passport is intended to better facilitate travel. Privacy advocates and Chinese netizens have expressed concerns regarding the potential invasive data collection and the use of data for non-health monitoring purposes.

EU
On 8 July 2021, the EU commission decided to accept Swiss COVID vaccine certificates, making them applicable in the entire Schengen area. .

Some EU countries, such as Hungary, started to recognize digital vaccine passports from outside of the EU, including from Kazakhstan. However, those certificates are not applicable in the Schengen area.

Japan vaccine passport
On 19 July 2021, Japan began accepting applications for its COVID-19 vaccination passport program. When issued, the passports will be in paper form in both Japanese and English, showing the holder's date(s) of inoculation and the vaccine type, and are available free of charge. As of 22 July 2021, Japan vaccine passport holders are exempt from entry restrictions in Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. South Korea will also exempt those travelling for specific business, academic, or humanitarian reasons. Entry is also facilitated by Germany, Honduras, Hong Kong, Lithuania, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Thailand's islands of Phuket, Samui, Ko Pha-Ngan, and Ko Tao. Japan is in negotiation with other countries (including China and the United States) to accept the passport.

Switzerland
Showing ID may not be required to attend a vaccination appointment but other checks could be in effect.

UK
An NHS Covid Pass exists in England, Scotland, and Wales.

The Department of Health has introduced an automated method for Northern Irish citizens who have received both their COVID-19 vaccinations in Northern Ireland to apply for COVID vaccination certification.

United States


the United States of America has not issued a digital COVID vaccine certificate either for domestic use or for travel abroad. Persons who are vaccinated in the US are issued a COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card by the CDC. However, those cards are easily forged and do not bear a copy-proof QR code nor a digital signature. Acceptance of CDC cards by other countries is not a given. In June 2021, a spokesperson for the EU pointed out that fully vaccinated Americans entering a Schengen nation could present proof of vaccination or negative test to the health authority of the host nation, which in turn could issue a digital EU COVID vaccine certificate. A number of US airlines have also encouraged passengers to upload health information before boarding a plane to a foreign destination. Digitally issued vaccine certificates have been internationally criticised due to privacy concerns, inequitable access and inconsistent acceptance of different vaccine types.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected Republican US Representative for Georgia, told her supporters on Facebook in early April 2021 that "something called a vaccine passport" was a form of "corporate communism" and part of the US Democratic Party effort to control people's lives. However, a representative survey of the U.S. population showed that, prior to the issue becoming politicized, public views on vaccination passports were evenly split and the divide crossed, rather than followed, political and ideological lines.

On 15 March 2021, Andy Slavitt, a White House senior adviser for COVID-19 response, said regarding the development of processes to verify COVID-19 vaccinations that: "It should be private. The data should be secure. Access to it should be free. It should be available both digitally and in paper and in multiple languages. And it should be open source". He added that "It's not the role of the [US federal] government to hold that data and to do that". Later, on 6 April 2021, an announcement was made that the US federal government would not introduce mandatory vaccine passports, citing privacy and human rights concerns.

The state governments of California, New York, and North Carolina have each rolled out mechanisms whereby residents can choose to receive proof of COVID-19 vaccination in the form of a scannable QR code by linking to records within each state's immunization registry. Virginia and Hawaii were developing similar QR-based vaccination passports as of August 2021. Each state pass has varying degrees of interoperability with other state and foreign governments; some states have closed systems, with QR codes that are only usable within the issuing state, and others have broad interoperability, with New York offering both types of passes for its residents. Arizona, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, Washington, West Virginia, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia have contracted with an organization that interfaces with governmental vaccination records to produce a PDF proof of vaccination, yet this firm has also moved toward scannable QR codes. Health departments in Indiana, Colorado, and Georgia can provide proof of vaccination in PDF form but not via a QR code.

Arguments and controversy
An opponent of Vaccine Passports in Britain has suggested that, to understand the dangers of Covid Passports, one should simply imagine an obesity equivalent. In a Daily Telegraph opinion piece, Sir Charles Walker MP wrote: ""The Government should not let its drive for health certification stall at Covid-19 passports. If it is serious about saving lives and promoting personal responsibility then it must target the avoidable and identifiable disease of obesity....It is an inescapable fact that a great many hospital beds, doctors and NHS resources have been absorbed over the past year by the clinically obese... It is clear that by sucking resource away from deserving illnesses and social causes, the obese kill those of a healthy weight. But at last change might be possible. In the same way that people will soon have to prove their Covid status, we could also be at the stage where technology could be deployed to monitor people's obesity status. Such a breakthrough would finally allow the state to restrict the overweight's access to certain dining facilities and high-calorie foods. Upon entering a restaurant, the business could scan a mobile phone app that showed your BMI. Those within the healthy range could order what they wished off the menu, while the overweight could be restricted to ordering size-limited portions. As for the obese, they could be asked to settle for a salad or simply invited to leave. For takeaway orders, companies such as Just Eat or Deliveroo could use the same data, taken over the telephone, to weed out the obese from placing a fast-food order. In supermarkets, your BMI status could be scanned at checkout, with fatter customers having certain foods removed from their baskets or replaced with healthier options."" Several US states, including South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Florida, Texas and Arizona, have banned the use of COVID-19 vaccination passports.

In April 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) advised against the use of mandatory COVID-19 vaccine passports for travel, citing ethics and efficacy concerns. In February 2021, the position of World Health Organization (WHO) on requiring proofs of COVID-19 vaccination for international travel purposes remains against on using this as a condition for departure or entry.

Reliability and Quality of Tests
The extent of protection of the vaccine for the emerging new variants of COVID-19 is not yet well understood. For a reasonable policy approach for quality the scientific reliability of tests, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that there should be an established minimum duration of immunity, reliable indicators of concentration/quantity antibody, and accurate availability of tests to ensure that the results are within satisfactory levels. The setting of the threshold of tolerable error is a responsibility of the government, not the private companies to avoid conflict of interest.

Ethical and Social Issues
The ethical issues that arise in the acceptability of vaccine passports revolve around the policy objectives and the intended use. The public health restriction on implementing vaccine passports limits the freedom of an individual to perform social activities. For people who are concerned about the economy and business, issuing vaccine passports would be beneficial because it prevents the severe consequences of a recession.

Existing social disparities in the society is likely to be affected by imposing COVID-19 vaccination certificates. People who are privileged to receive the vaccination will have gained access to going back to normal life while low-income populations will remain disproportionately low on vaccinations which hinders their social privilege to go out. The religious people and/or people who refuse to get vaccinated have also restricted their own liberties.

International standards
The Royal Society published a report on 19 February 2021 where a lead author of the report, Professor Melinda Mills, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford said: “Understanding what a vaccine passport could be used for is a fundamental question – is it literally a passport to allow international travel or could it be used domestically to allow holders greater freedoms? The intended use will have significant implications across a wide range of legal and ethical issues that need to be fully explored and could inadvertently discriminate or exacerbate existing inequalities.” The report lists 12 essential criteria for an international standard.

On 12 March 2021, Ecma International announced its intention to create an international standard which prevents counterfeits and protects private data as much as possible in a "Call for Participation on Vaccine Passports International Standardization" that referenced the earlier report from the UK's Royal Society. In August 2021, Ecma International announced revisions to Ecma-417 (Architectures for distributed real-time access systems) relevant to standards for vaccine passports.

Ethics
Due to the imbalance in the distribution of vaccines in the developing world, there are concerns about the inequity of vaccine passports for travellers. In a 15 April 2021 meeting published 4 days later, the World Health Organisation’s emergency committee opposed vaccination passports, saying "States Parties are strongly encouraged to acknowledge the potential for requirements of proof of vaccination to deepen inequities and promote differential freedom of movement".

However, many countries may increasingly consider the vaccination status of travellers when deciding to allow them entry or whether to require them to quarantine. “Some sort of vaccine certificate will be important” to reboot travel and tourism, according to Dr David Nabarro, special envoy on COVID-19 for the World Health Organization (WHO), in February 2021. Countries experimenting with or seriously considering COVID-19 vaccination passports include Aruba, Britain, Israel and Canada.

In March 2021, Bernardo Mariano, the WHO's Director of Digital Health and Innovation, said that "We don't approve the fact that a vaccination passport should be a condition for travel." Lawmakers in several US states are also considering legislation to prohibit COVID-19 vaccination passports.

it is not yet clear whether vaccinated people that remain asymptomatic are still contagious and are thus silent spreaders of the virus putting unvaccinated people at risk. "A lot of people are thinking that once they get vaccinated, they’re not going to have to wear masks any more," said Michal Tal, an immunologist at Stanford University. "It’s really going to be critical for them to know if they have to keep wearing masks, because they could still be contagious."