Vaccination Certificates and Immunity Status Passports – Urgent and Important By Francis Tuffy – Consultant Editor
In the coming months, operators of international travel, work, education, hospitality and health will be faced with this ‘loaded gun in a crowded restaurant’ question: how can I know whether allowing an individual into my country, place of work, school, venue or hospital might raise the probability of virus transmission? We already have a requirement of entry for each of these scenarios based on proving that you have a negative result from a recent COVID test, and we are well advanced on adding immunity status to the criteria for entry in some cases. The starting assumption for this White Paper is not whether some kind of immunity status passport is ethically or politically expedient, rather it is that standardisation and interoperability (the long-hand for ‘passport’) is inevitable to navigate the thousands of bilateral arrangements that are already emerging between border controls and travellers, airlines and passengers, employers and employees, educators and students, venue managers and guests, and medical professionals and visitors. The second principle for the White Paper is that security should be built in now and not bolted on later. It seems probable that, when you apply for an immunity status passport, you will have to present evidence of health status linked to your identity, in the same way that when you currently apply for a (travel) passport you have to provide documentary evidence of citizenship linked to your identity. The evidence of health status currently in circulation comes from being vaccinated and (or) tested for COVID (virus and antibodies). In most cases, documents recording these events are records with little or no security against fraud. If we don’t build security into vaccination certificates and test results now, we face the far more costly prospect, in time and money, of bolting it on later. If the first assumption proves correct, then the second principle falls under the remit of the ID and secure document industry. That is why this collection of editorials, invited commentaries and sponsored articles is both urgent and important. These developments come at a time when the ID and secure document industry is itself undergoing rapid change. Secure documents linked to an identity (for instance, birth/marriage/death certificates, ID, passport, driving licence) that for decades have been issued on paper have, over the past few years, migrated to digital formats. An example of this is the driving licence which, for many years, was a paper based secure document. Some years ago, it transitioned to a wallet sized plastic document but still contained the same information including name, date of birth and categories of driving entitlement. Several US states have now adopted a mobile driving licence format which essentially puts that same information into a digital format. In the event of a traffic infringement the officer can access that information online to determine the entitlement of the driver. This transformation from paper and plastic to a digital format is regarded as a physical to digital transformation.
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HEALTH STATUS PROOF | WHITE PAPER No.1
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Allowing an individual into a country, place of work, school, venue or hospital might raise the probability of virus transmission
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