US President Joe Biden is reportedly considering developing a “vaccine passport” in partnership with businesses.
The Department of Health and Human services, along with an office that works exclusively on health information technology, are the driving forces behind the vaccine passport initiative.
With the US President declaring that the country will return to normalcy with most public venues, events, and such being restarted, the vaccine passport initiative is now gaining steady momentum across several countries that are using the situation to usher in a new wave of privacy-invasive systems.
If the digital vaccine passport system does come into effect, individuals may have to produce their personal vaccine passports to be allowed to enter into public properties such as shopping malls, concerts, events, and other similar public gatherings.
“The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen,” wrote authors Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun, and Issac Stanley-Becker in a recent report in The Washington Post.
They further said that the exact applications and implications that come with a vaccine passport are unknown at this moment. “The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” the report states.
While we could anticipate what the potential applications of the vaccine passport may be, at the end of it all, we would have to wait for the official sources to confirm their plans. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for instance, recently commented that credentials such as a vaccine passport can act as an admittance pass to public events and cultural activities such as theatrical shows and concerts and New York is already full steam ahead in implementing the bio passes.
“If it became a government mandate, it would go down a dark road very quickly. It becomes a credential. It becomes a ‘needing your papers,’ if you will. That could be dangerous — and it could turn off people,” said Brian C. Castrucci from public health group, the de Beaumont Foundation, that’s taking a closer look into the implications of a vaccine passport or credential of a similar type.
