Immunity Status Passports – Watering the Green Shoots of Recovery By Editorial Team
The idea of immunity status passports has been debated amongst governments since the start of the pandemic. Against warnings from critics of potential discriminatory, non-inclusive and anti-privacy practices, two countries are forging ahead with plans for their roll out. This has been followed more recently by the European Union. Like many countries around the world, Denmark is desperate to reopen the parts of its economy frozen by the pandemic. The kingdom of under 6 million people has become one of the most efficient vaccination distributors in Europe and aims to have offered its whole population a jab by June 2021. As early as July 2020, Denmark was offering its citizens a service to apply for a COVID PCR-test through the country’s national health website which, if the test came back negative, meant they could download a document certificating the result. At the beginning of February 2021, Denmark’s government said it was joining forces with businesses to develop a digital passport that would show whether the holder has been vaccinated against COVID-19, in an effort to facilitate and revive travel. Danish Finance Minister Morten Boedskov told a news conference that ‘in three, four months, a digital corona passport will be ready for use in, for example, business travel’. ‘It will be the extra passport that you will be able to have on your mobile phone that documents that you have been vaccinated,’ Boedskov said. ‘We can be among the first in the world to have it and can show it to the rest of the world.’ Unlike tourist destination countries such as Greece and Spain that are running immunity status pilots, the objective is not to attract foreign holiday makers this summer. The move to add immunity status to the personally identifiable information on Denmark's planned passport would be rolled out first to business travellers, eager to rekindle the commerce with foreign markets that accounts for a third of its GDP. Once the business sector is up and running, the hope is that Denmark's hospitality and mass entertainment sectors can then adopt the COVID passport. Boedskov said it was ‘absolutely crucial for us to be able to restart Danish society so that companies can get back on track. Many Danish companies are global companies with the whole world as a market.’ As a first step, citizens in Denmark will be able to check a Danish health website for official confirmation of whether they have been vaccinated. As one of the world's most digitised countries, Denmark is ideally placed to become a testing ground for this new approach, drawing on public and private collaboration.
14 HEALTH STATUS PROOF | WHITE PAPER No.1
