The Common Trust Network, an initiative of the non-profit organization The Commons Project and the Geneva-based World Economic Forum, has partnered with several airlines, including Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, as well as hundreds of health systems. in the United States and the government of Aruba.
The CommonPass app created by the group allows users to upload medical data such as the result of a Covid-19 test or, eventually, a vaccination test by a hospital or medical professional. generate a health certificate or pass in the form of a QR code that can be shown to authorities without revealing confidential information. For travel, the app lists the health pass requirements at the departure and arrival points based on your itinerary.
“You can get tested every time you cross a border. You can’t get vaccinated every time you cross a border,” Thomas Crampton, director of marketing and communications for The Commons Project, told CNN Business. He stressed the need for a simple and easily transferable set of credentials, or a “digital yellow card”, referring to the paper document that is generally issued as proof of vaccination.
Big tech companies are joining in, too. IBM (IBM) developed its own app, called Digital Health Pass, which allows businesses and venues to customize the indicators they would need to enter, including coronavirus tests, temperature checks, and vaccination records. The credentials corresponding to those indicators are stored in a mobile wallet.
In an effort to address a challenge around getting back to normal after vaccines are widely distributed, developers may now face other challenges, ranging from privacy concerns to representing the varied efficacy of different vaccines. But the most pressing challenge may simply be avoiding the disjointed implementation and mixed success of the technology’s previous attempt to address the public health crisis: contact tracing apps.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) put aside its rivalry with smartphones to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users if they have been exposed to someone with Covid-19. Many countries and state governments around the world also developed and used their own applications.
“I think where exposure notification faced some challenges was more fragmented implementation options, a lack of federal leadership … where each state had to go it alone, and therefore each state had to figure it out. independent, “said Jenny Wanger, who leads exposure notification initiatives for Linux Foundation Public Health, a technology-focused organization that helps public health authorities around the world fight Covid-19.
To foster better coordination this time around, the Linux Foundation has partnered with the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative, a collective of more than 300 people representing dozens of organizations on five continents. and is also working with IBM and CommonPass to help develop a set of universal standards for vaccine credential applications.
“If we are successful, I should be able to say: I have a vaccine certificate on my phone that I got when I was vaccinated in a country, with a whole set of their own health management practices … that I use to I got on a plane to a completely different country and then presented in that new country a vaccination card to be able to go to that concert that was taking place in the interior for which attendance was limited to those who have shown that they have been vaccinated “said Brian Behlendorf, CEO of the Linux Foundation.
“It must be interoperable in the same way that email is interoperable, in the same way that the web is interoperable, “he said.” Right now, we’re in a situation where there are some moving parts that bring us closer to that, but I think there is a sincere commitment from everyone in the industry. ”
Part of ensuring the wide use of vaccine passports is taking into account the large subset of the world’s population that still does not use or have access to smartphones. Some companies within the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that finds a middle ground between traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that is easier to store and reproduce.
“For us it is [about] how that digital credential can be stored, it can be presented, not only through smartphones, but also in other ways for those people who do not have stable Internet access and also who do not own smartphones, “said Lucy Yang, co-director of the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative. “We are looking into it and there are companies that are doing really promising work.
Once they build a vaccine passport, companies will need to make sure that people are comfortable using it. That means facing concerns about the handling of private medical information.
CommonPass, IBM and the Linux Foundation have emphasized privacy as a central element of their initiatives. IBM says it allows users to control and consent to the use of their health data and allows them to choose the level of detail they want to provide to authorities.
“Trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform like a digital health passport or any solution that handles sensitive personal information,” the company said in a blog post. “Putting privacy first is an important priority for managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times.”
With vaccines manufactured by multiple companies in various countries at different stages of development, there are many variables that passport manufacturers will need to take into account.
“An entry point, be it a border, if it’s a place, you want to know, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, did you get the Chinese vaccine, so they can make a decision accordingly,” Crampton said. The variation can be wide: the vaccine developed by the Chinese state pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, is 86% effective against Covid-19, while the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna are each around 95% effective. .
It’s also unclear how effective vaccines are in stopping virus transmission, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport app will show that you received the vaccine, it may not be a guarantee that you will be attending an event or taking a flight safely.
“We still don’t know if vaccinated people can transmit the infection or not,” he told CNN Business. “Until that is cleared up, we won’t know if the ‘passports’ will be effective.”
Still, Behlendorf anticipates that vaccine passport implementation and adoption will happen fairly quickly once everything is in place and expects a variety of applications that can work with each other to be “widely available” in the first half of 2021.
“Rest assured, the nerds are on it,” he said.
