“India, which has administered over a billion jabs, has a “CoWIN” certificate with a QR code, identifying information and, confusingly, a photograph not of the bearer but of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. People in England can choose between a QR code on the National Health Service (NHS) app or website or a letter of certification from their doctor. In America, where President Joe Biden has vowed not to create a national vaccination database, many different state and private health passes are in use.
The trouble is that these passes are not interoperable. Most look the same: a QR code on a smartphone or piece of paper. Yet even scanning the codes can be a problem: different verifier apps read different passes. Once scanned, the codes serve up widely varying information, depending on the national or local health systems or attitudes about privacy. Some vaccine passports, like the CommonPass used in parts of America, share raw data on vaccination status. Others, like the one issued by the NHS, yield only a symbol, a tick or a cross. And the rules of the game are not fixed. During a surge of infections this month, Israel retracted its “green pass” from 2m people who had not yet received booster jabs.
It is past time for standardisation. Yet designing a digital health pass is trickier than designing a travel document. Passports may reveal age, but vaccine passes are gateways to personal health information, potentially a great deal of it. That scares people.
Even in the rich world, where most people have been jabbed, support for vaccine passports varies from 65% in Britain to 43% in Japan and 41% in Germany.
Without a trusted way to verify certificates across borders, even the most advanced technology falters.
Bits of paper signed by clinicians, like the WHO’s “yellow card”, have sufficed as immunisation records for decades. These are more globally inclusive, given many people in poor countries do not have smartphones.
Perhaps, from the ashes of the pandemic, the world will devise a seamless digital vaccine passport that will replace the yellow card. But when covid is still killing thousands of people a week, the bickering over QR codes and digital signatures among multilateral organisations, tech groups and states is a sideshow, if not a distraction. Vaccine passports will never contain the virus. Only vaccines will.”
Mocht u nog verlegen zitten om een goed argument tegen de Covid-pas (of QR-code of vaccinatiepas, etc. etc.) dan heeft The Economist een pareltje voor u gevonden. Want een digitale Covid-pas standaardiseren zodat het kan worden gebruikt in alle landen en alle regio’s, staten en deelrepublieken is onmogelijk.
Want technologie. Waar ze in het ene land beter in zijn dan in het andere land. En al die landen willen natuurlijk allemaal gebruik maken van hun eigen technologie. Technologie die vooral niet wordt vertrouwd door de gebruikers die hun medische privacy nu al in rook zien opgaan.
Vroeger, toen alles nog overzichtelijk was in een wereld die was verdeeld in goed en kwaad, had iedereen gewoon hetzelfde papieren vaccinatiepaspoort. Wat overal prima werkte. Toen werd de smartphone uitgevonden. Daarna de QR-code. De rest is chaotische geschiedenis.
Misschien, inderdaad, eerst maar gewoon eens dat virus uitroeien en dan pas verder kijken naar digitale pasjesmogelijkheden?
