iProov’s founder and CEO Andrew Bud tells me their system involves the creation of a certificate to demonstrate that you have been vaccinated. They have developed a number of options, some of which will need the involvement of the Department of Health.
Currently, vaccination records are held by the National Immunisation Management System, which is run by Public Health England, Scotland and Wales independently of the NHS, and within GP surgery patient records. The iProov/Mvine system proposes storing these vaccination records using cloud technology, so they are neither held on your phone nor within existing NHS record systems.
“One of the defining features of the Mvine/iProov system is that it is designed for privacy,” says Bud. “It doesn’t require a name or address or date of birth or National Insurance number or any other irrelevant data. Our system is designed to associate the existence of a valid vaccine certificate with a face.”
Other companies that have received grants include: EAS Technologies (£137,877), which is focusing on vaccine verification for sporting events; the Hub Company (£49,448), which features PayPal and IBM among its clients; Enduring Net (£49,678), which says it usually focuses on technology “in humanitarian work”; and Verifiable Credentials (£89,000), which is planning to create “Covid-19 certificates” that cannot be forged.
But they are not only runners in this race. In fact, the UK Government is undertaking a three-month review of “vaccine passport” technology and may even consider repurposing the pre-existing NHS app — separate to its track and trace app — which gives people access to their medical records.
However, according to Phil Booth, co-ordinator of medConfidential, a campaign group promoting best practice in safeguarding the confidentiality of medical records, this would likely be unpopular among NHS staff.
“It would essentially turn the NHS into a clearing house for information requested by the private sector,” he says. “This would find great resistance among those responsible for NHS Login [the online portal that patients can use to access a host of services and see their GP medical records]. Being forced to be a certification authority in the midst of all their other pandemic work would be a massive drain on resources and, frankly, a distraction.”
Moreover, Booth says, it is unclear what the purpose of all this technology would be: “It would be impossible for the government to partner up with private companies to produce vaccine passports until everybody had had the offer of a vaccine — otherwise requiring a passport to get through everyday life would be discriminatory.
“But the vaccine take up is so great — about 90 per cent in the higher age groups — that by the time everybody has been offered one, we will probably have reached herd immunity. So, what’s the point of having a passport that will get you into a pub in those circumstances?”
Still, that hasn’t deterred countries across the world from investing in this technology. Israel was one of the first, followed by Greece, Malta, Portugal, Israel, Estonia, Sweden and Norway. None of these countries has said that foreign internationals without proof of vaccination would be refused entry, but instead would be subject to other — more laborious and time-consuming — testing or quarantine regimes.
Domestically, Israel is the only country to have vaccinated enough people to have a system that is already functioning. About half of its 9.3 million citizens have received the two jabs required to qualify for a “green pass” that they can display using a Health Ministry app on their phones — people with such passes are already being granted access to restaurants, shops and theatres.
Airlines, too, are getting in on the act, courtesy of the pre-existing International Air Transport Association (IATA) Travel Pass app. This provides information to travellers on the Covid requirements of the country they are travelling to, tells them where they can get tested if required, enables labs to send results directly to passengers, and, crucially, provides for the creation of a digital vaccination record once governments make them available.
Among those already trialling aspects of it are Singapore Airlines, Etihad, RwandAir, Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Air New Zealand. Moreover, on top of all these initiatives is a whole host of private sector travel and vaccination record schemes, among them IBM’s Digital Health Pass, Daon’s Verifly (currently being trialled by BA and American Airlines) and Microsoft’s Vaccination Credential Initiative.
But with the creation of so many disparate apps and vaccination confirmation systems, surely we will need some kind of international co-ordination for them to be practicable. And there is currently only one body that has an internationally-recognised proof-of-vaccination scheme — the World Health Organisation’s Yellow Card. Indeed, it increasingly seems that the WHO will be called upon to provide a solution to all this apparent chaos.
Already it has teamed up with Estonia — arguably the country with the world’s most efficient joined-up governmental IT architecture — to come up with a system that would enable national “vaccine passport” solutions to work in an international setting.
At the forefront of this partnership is Marten Kaevats, National Digital Adviser to the Estonian government and a member of the WHO’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group. He says no new technology would be needed for an international system to work. Instead, building up trust among nations, so that they can rely on the information provided by others, would be paramount.
“We currently see most of the different governments deploying various sorts of their own technologies,” he tells me. “In order for these technologies to be able to co-operate with each other, we need to agree upon common global standards and principles.”
The WHO has set up a Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group in order to achieve this. But, says Kaveats, “the WHO doesn’t currently have a mandate to become the global anchor of trust for cross-border health data services. It could be given that at the end of May when the World Health Assembly [the decision-making body of the WHO] next convenes.”
With the threat of other Coronavirus variants — or entirely new viruses and pandemics — continuing to loom over us, it certainly seems only a matter before an international solution such as the WHO’s is devised. In the meantime, the race for a vaccine may be over. But the race to create vaccine passports has only just begun.
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