Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
There are a couple organizations trying to figure out how to have a digital covid vaccination passport, (they are using the term passport) so that you could show something on your phone like a bar code and that could verify that you had the vaccine. That is being looked at for border crossings and some airlines are looking at that.
My state (Wisconsin) has an electronic registry of vaccinations, I can look up the dates that I had my flu shots going back over a decade. And the covid shots will be on that registry. The state maintains that, it can't be faked.
Some smart people are working on how to prove if you have had a test or had the vaccination(s), trying to make it easy to use such as a phone app.
WHO has a paper format for a yellow fever card that looks like the following and is used by countries at points of admission.
We aren't quite there as far as standardization goes for Covid, but at point:
-- vaccines are more widely available in developing world and other places
-- we know how much it is a "one and done" vaccination vs. one that keeps changing
There definitely could be a similar standardization effort.
Just as Wisconsin has a registry, I've gotten various documents from Larimer County Colorado health department, Portland travel clinic and Texas doctors offices. So I have a collection of documents I can use to document vaccinations, etc but the problem is they aren't quite standard across different geographies and so tougher to really verify if you aren't from that geography.
WHO yellow fever cards can be faked, but I suspect the larger issue is mostly travelers that are unaware they need documentation and get tripped up at points of entry. So I think some limited standardization could also help a Covid type passport whether digital or in a paper representation. I suspect a paper backup will still be useful in the broadest usage.