With coronavirus vaccines now rolling out across the United States, businesses and schools are considering how, and what it will take, to safely resume in-person operations.
Some of the country’s biggest tech firms and health care organizations have joined together to help facilitate that return to “normal.”
The group, called the Vaccine Credential Initiative, wants to ensure that everyone has access to a secure, digital record of their Covid-19 vaccination — like a digital vaccine passport — that can be stored in people’s smartphones.
The records could be used for everything from airline travel to entering concert venues.
The coalition comprises a broad range of health care and tech leaders including Microsoft (MSFT), Salesforce (CRM), Oracle (ORCL), Cerner (CERN), Cigna’s (CI) Evernorth, health care software firm Epic and the Mayo Clinic, among others.
The announcement Thursday comes amid a rocky start to the Covid-19 vaccine rollout. Of the 30.6 million doses of vaccines that have been distributed to US hospitals, health centers and pharmacies, only about 10.6 million people had received at least their first dose as of Friday morning, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Commons Project created an app called Common Pass, where people can store digital records of their Covid-19 test results and, eventually, their Covid-19 vaccination record.
“Now you are going to need either your lab results or vaccination data to get on an airplane, to go to school, go to work — real life, non-health-care use cases.
“And it needs to be in a standard form so when you’re presenting it, people actually understand, ‘Oh, it was the Pfizer vaccine that you got.
‘”The Covid-19 vaccination record also needs to be verifiable and secure in a way that was less important for past vaccination records — otherwise,a person could try to fake having gotten the Covid-19 vaccine by using someone else’s record.
