The Common Trust Network, an initiative of the Geneva Non-Profit Organization The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum, has partnered with several airlines such as Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic. , in addition to hundreds of health systems across the United States and the Aruba government.
The CommonPass app created by the group allows users to upload medical data such as a Covid-19 test result or possibly 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 the authorities without revealing sensitive information. For travel, the app lists the health permit requirements at the points of departure and arrival based on your itinerary.
“You can test every time you cross a border. You can’t get vaccinated every time you cross a border,” Thomas Crampton, head of marketing and communications at The Commons Project, told CNN Business. He stressed the need for a simple, easily transferable set of credentials, or a “digital yellow card,” referring to the paper document that is usually issued as proof of vaccination.
Large technology companies are also involved. IBM (IBM) developed its own app, called Digital Health Pass, which allows companies and sites to customize the indicators they would need for their entry, including coronavirus testing, temperature checks and vaccination records. The credentials corresponding to these indicators are stored in a mobile wallet.
In an effort to address a challenge to return to normalcy after vaccines are widely distributed, developers may have to face other challenges, ranging from privacy issues to representing the varied efficacy of different vaccines. But the most urgent challenge may simply be to avoid the unknown implementation and mixed success of the technology’s previous attempt to address the public health crisis: contact tracking applications.
At the beginning of the pandemic, apple (AAPL) i Google (GOOG) set aside their 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 the notification of the exposure faced some challenges more than partial implementation options, the lack of federal leadership … where each state had to go it alone and therefore each state had to discover “Independently,” said Jenny Wanger, who leads the exposure reporting initiatives of the 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 also works with IBM and CommonPass to help develop a set of universal standards for vaccine credential applications.
“If we are successful, you should be able to say: I have a vaccine certificate on my phone that I received when I was vaccinated in a country, with a whole set of own health management practices … that I usually do get on a plane to a completely different country and then I presented in this new country a vaccination credential to be able to go to the concert that was done indoors and in which attendance was limited to those who have proven to have the vaccine Said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Linux Foundation.
“It must be interoperable in the same way that email is interoperable, “Just like 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’s a sincere commitment from everyone in the industry.”
Part of ensuring widespread use of vaccine passports is to account for the large subset of the world’s population who do not yet use or have access to smartphones. Some companies in the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that reaches a middle ground between traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that is easier to store and play.
“It simply came to our notice then [about] “How can these digital credentials be stored, not only through smartphones, but also in other ways for those people who don’t have stable internet access and who don’t own smartphones,” Lucy Yang said. , co-leader of the Covid-19 Credentials initiative. “We are studying it and there are companies that are doing a really promising job.
Once a vaccine passport is built, companies will need to make sure people are comfortable with it. This means addressing concerns about the treatment 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 such as 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 various companies in different countries at different stages of development, there are many variables that passport manufacturers will need to consider.
“An entry point (whether it’s a border, whether it’s a place) will want to know, have you received the Pfizer vaccine, have you received the Russian vaccine, have you had the Chinese vaccine, so they can make a decision? accordingly, “Crampton said. The variation can be wide: the vaccine developed by Chinese pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, is 86% effective against Covid-19, while the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are about 95% effective.
The effectiveness of vaccines in stopping the transmission of the virus is also unclear, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. Therefore, even if a vaccine passport application proves that you received the shot, it may not be a guarantee that you will attend an event safely or that you will be able to fly.
“We still don’t know if vaccinated people can transmit the infection or not,” he told CNN Business. “Until this is clarified, we will not know if the ‘passports’ will be effective.”
However, Behlendorf predicts that the launch and adoption of vaccine passports will happen quickly once everything is in place and expects a large number of applications that can work with each other to be “widely available” during the first half of 2021.
“Calm down, the nerds are there,” he said.
