Political arguments about vaccine passports have been raging for months : whether we need them, if they could be built equitably , and if they are ultimately an infringement on Americans’ rights to keep their health information private. But while other countries experiment with rolling out digital vaccination credentials, the U.S. national effort was doomed before it ever began. Security experts had hoped that the government would develop a national system for credentialing vaccine recipients. A national vaccine passport would create a single standard that could be used everywhere and would be potentially difficult to fake. But on Tuesday, the White House announced the federal government would not be “supporting” a vaccine credential system. Part of what that means is that there will be no centralized database where all vaccination records live—a crucial feature of vaccine verification systems in other countries like Israel and Estonia. “Unless there was a major change in how health data is viewed from a public and government perspective, it wouldn’t even be possible to create the database,” says JP Pollak, cofounder and chief architect of the Commons Project, which has developed a globally available mobile app for storing COVID-19 testing results. “States have the mandate for maintaining vaccination registries and states are required to report things like how many people have been vaccinated for COVID-19, but they actually are not permitted to transmit the personal information of people back to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].” . @PressSec Jen Psaki on possibility of the federal government supporting vaccine passports: “The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential.” Full video here: https://t.co/TLFF718hVo pic.twitter.com/jJP0Ph95jH — CSPAN (@cspan) April 6, 2021 Since states are charged with maintaining vaccine registries, some, like New York, are creating their own credentialing systems
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We’re not getting a national vaccine passport. Here’s why it never stood a chance