Health and tech giants, including Microsoft and Oracle, are creating ‘vaccination passports’

A frontline healthcare worker receives a Moderna COVID-19 vaccination at the Park County Health Departments storefront clinic on January 5, 2021 in Livingston, Montana.

Photo by William Campbell/Getty Images

Health and tech giants are together creating digital vaccination passports so people can prove they’ve had a Covid-19 shot.
Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic Systems, and the Mayo Clinic are all part of the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VIC).
These could be useful for airplanes, going to work, to school, to the grocery store, to live concerts, or to sporting events.
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Major companies, health organizations, and nonprofits announced Thursday morning that they were working together to create a digital vaccination passport, in anticipation of people having to prove their immunization status.

The Vaccination Credential Initiative (VIC), a coalition of organisations including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic Systems, and the Mayo Clinic, are developing tech standards to verify whether someone has had their vaccine, it said in a statement Thursday.

The tech will help prevent people falsely claiming to be immune to the deadly virus, it said.

The VIC said that people without smartphones could receive printed QR codes on paper to verify they’ve had the shot.

“The goal of the Vaccination Credential Initiative is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records so they can use tools like CommonPass to safely return to travel, work, school, and life, while protecting their data privacy,” said Paul Meyer, CEO of The Commons Project Foundation, a nonprofit in Geneva which is a member of the VIC.

“For some period of time, most all of us are going to have to demonstrate either negative Covid-19 testing or an up-to-date vaccination status to go about the normal routines of our lives,” Dr. Brad Perkins, the chief medical officer at the Commons Project Foundation, told the New York Times.

That will happen, Dr. Perkins added, “whether it’s getting on an airplane and going to a different country, whether it’s going to work, to school, to the grocery store, to live concerts or sporting events.”