I now have a Vaccine Passport. I thought it might be of interest to describe setting it up and how it works. The Vaccine Passport – it says that it is intended to support travel abroad – is a smartphone application which has been available since the 17th May, but I gave it a week just in case. If there had been major problems with it, I was happy to let someone else find that out.
There’s an app for everything these days. There’s a NHS (National Health Service) app, which allows you to schedule doctor’s appointments, re-order prescriptions and so forth; and the passport has been added to that. So, having downloaded the NHS app, you have to set the vaccine passport up. You enter personal data – name, DOB, NHS number, address, email address and so on. The personal information allows the app to find your medical records on the NHS IT system. You can limit cookies to essential only. The app then uses your phone camera three times. (1) – it takes a picture of your face; (2) – you have to take a photo of an item of photo ID – passport, driving licence etc (there are workarounds if you have no photo ID); (3) it does some weird facial recognition thing to confirm that your face matches the photo ID. If it’s all in order, you’re set up and good to go.
To use the passport (“Share Your COVID-19 Status - View and share proof of your COVID-19 status for travel”) you enter email and password (you can do fingerprint or facial recognition instead). It pings you a 6 digit code; you enter the code; and the passport consists of a screen showing your details, vaccination history and a big matrix code (which says that it expires 20th June).
And there I run out of information. Mrs T got her phone and tried to read the code – it isn’t readable. I guess you have to have the right software installed to read it. I presume the code takes you to the photo taken when the app was setting up, to verify whose status – and indeed passport – this is.
All in all, does what it says on the tin.
j