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.

‘Allowing an individual into a country, place of work, school, venue or hospital might raise the probability of virus transmission’

COVID-19 Certificate

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But a new breed of documents, linked to the identity of an individual, is now making inroads into the physical to digital transformation. In Pakistan, for example, UNICEF has been running a mobile birth registration programme since 2016; to date around 1 million unregistered Pakistani children have been registered virtually – providing the same legal rights as the physical registration process but without issuing physical documents or their digital equivalents. This distinction between physical to digital and virtual-from-start is important not just because it captures a period of transition within the ID and secure document industry, but because it is what is happening now as we consider adopting vaccine certificates and immunity status passports. Currently, COVID vaccinations and tests are being carried out on a massive scale – with each event supposedly documented in some form of certificate. In reality, these documents can best be described as a record as they are seldom certified by a competent authority and do not securely link the result to an individual’s identity. Most of these records have been issued on paper with little regard for security and in a variety of different formats. Through standardisation and then interoperability, these documents will transition first to a digital representation of the information and ultimately, for some use cases, into a virtual state with no traceability to a physical document. But while it is enticing to imagine travellers passing seamlessly through the highly controlled environments of Charles de Gaulle or O’Hare airports, with only a mobile app to navigate their route through ticketing and security, the reality is that a successful immunity status passport will have to be universal… working for all citizens in all settings. Progress towards the inevitable formulation of an immunity status passport will not be linear as new variants of the virus are discovered, vaccination numbers make faltering progress and the balance between economic recovery and public health concerns swings one way and then the other. This White Paper is the first in a succession of explorations of the role of the ID and secure document industry in helping roll out vaccination certificates and, ultimately, immunity status passports. The hope is, that out of this series of White Papers an Industry Roadmap will emerge – charting the urgent and important course from short term requirements to long term strategies.

name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccination…type of vaccine…name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccination…type COVID-19 Certificate of vaccine…name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccination…name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccination…type of vaccine… name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccination…type 01010 101000101 01010000101 11110101001 01010101110 01010010101 01010101011 01001010101 01001010101 01001001010 01111010101 01110101 000 type of vaccine…name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccination…type of vaccine…name…date of birth…test result…date of 01010101000101010100001011111010 10010101010111001010010101010101 01011010010101010100101010101001 00101001111010101011101010000101 of vaccine…name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccination… type of vaccine…name…date of birth…test result…date of vaccina Pass