This is a follow-up to my April 9 post, with a slight correction. I need to stop using the term “health passport,” and should instead use the term “vaccine certificate.” So starting now I’m doing that. Although I still think passports are cool, even if vaccine certificates aren’t passports.
It’s also a follow-up to my February 16 post, which noted that there are a whole bunch of health pa- I mean vaccine certificates that are being marketed by various companies and organizations.
In addition to Clear’s Health Pass, there are a myriad of other options, including AOKpass, CommonPass, IATA Travel Pass, IBM Digital Health Pass, the Mvine-iProov solution, Scan2Fly from AirAsia, VaccineGuard from Guardtime, VeriFLY from Daon, the Vaccination Credential Initiative, and probably some others that I missed.
Obviously it takes a while to solve such issues, so you can’t expect that all of this would be resolved by April.
And you’re right.
As Chris Burt of FindBiometrics recently noted, the whole vaccine certificate issue was recently discussed by a panel at an ID4Africa webinar. Now even if you haven’t heard of the organization ID4Africa, you can reasonably conclude that the organization is in favor of…IDs for Africa.
And even they are a bit skittish about vaccine passports, at least for now.
Questions around how these digital health certificates should work, where and whether they should be used, and what can be done to mitigate the risks associated with them remain, and were explored by an international panel of experts representing major global organizations convened by ID4Africa. They found that too much remains unknown to inform final decisions…
The panel warned against rushing headlong into adoption of vaccine certificates without a better understanding of what they were, how they would work, and how individual information would be protected. And there are major questions all over the “how they would work” question, including the long-standing question of how vaccine certificates would be interoperable.
It quickly emerged that while several groups represented are working on similar projects, there are some key differences in goals.
The WHO is building specification which are intended to create digital records not for crossing borders or proving health status to any third party, but merely for continuity of care. Its working group also includes ICAO, IATA, and ISO, each of which have their own applications in mind for digital health credentials.
See the list above.
And even if you just look at the WHO’s project, it’s still not finalized. The present timeframe calls for a version 1.0 of its specification by the end of June, but timelines sometimes slip.
Chris Burt details many other issues in his article, but for purposes of my post, it’s relevant to say that it will be months if not years before we will see any sort of interoperability between vaccine certificates.
Bredemarket 
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