What kind of idiot would pay for a fake copy of something they will give you a real copy of for free?
Um, no, it’s not. I have a US passport. The US government does not have my fingerprints or my iris/retina scan. They have the photograph I submitted with my last passport renewal, and the mathematical information they can glean therefrom.
Vaccines are not administered by civil servants. They are administered by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and a whole slew of other health professionals in a range of settings. How do you get the information securely from a pop-up clinic at the shopping mall to the national government? How does the civil servant know who the pharmacist vaccinated, unless the pharmacy staff is keeping biometric data?
No, but are they going to get a vaccine if the process for getting the shot requires disclosure of their presence, facial contours, fingerprints, or whatever other biometrics are in place? If the CVS pharmacy or the vaccine clinic requires biometrics to know who got the shot, that is going to increase vaccine hesitancy in a vulnerable population; what are the public health implications thereof? Right now, most public health departments are vaccinating everybody, regardless of citizenship status (example) or presence/absence of identification documents, and they’re just handing out paper cards. How do you hand out “secure” proof of vaccination in such circumstances, or do you just give up and leave a reservoir of unvaccinated workers, many in essential occupations?
Only 38 years for me, and there’s no sign of the scar.
FWIW, here’s something I posted in another thread a couple of days ago:
Useful background, I hope.
j
As an addendum to the above, you can get the passport to mail you a link to a downloadable (and printable) copy of your vaccination status. This reads (with redactions for obvious reasons):
[Big QR code]
This is a downloaded copy. Check against the bearer’s identity.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination records
This document is important. Keep it safe. It proves that you have been vaccinated.
Name: [TREP]
Date of birth: [Long ago]
2D barcode expiration date: 20 June 2021
Your NHS Records shows that you have received the following vaccines:
Dose 1
Date of vaccination X February 2021
Vaccine product Vaxzevria
Manufacturer AstraZeneca AB
Disease targeted COVID-19
Vaccine SARS Cov-2 Antigen Vaccine
Batch number AB000X
Country of vaccination GB
Authority NHS Digital
Dose 2
Date of vaccination [etc]…
j
Because they don’t want the vaccine, but they want the privileges that come with being vaccinated.
That works in the UK because, as I understand it, the NHS is responsible for vaccine distribution AND has pretty much everybody’s medical records anyway.
In the US, vaccines are being distributed primarily through the state health departments, and then through whatever subnetworks they have established (local public health agencies, hospital systems, etc.). However, most people are not receiving the vaccine through their regular medical provider (assuming they have a regular provider in the first place), and there is no real analog to the NHS central repository of medical records.
In my case, for example, I was vaccinated via a clinic established at my employer; they billed my insurance company, and somebody (insurance? local public health dept? ?) notified my doctor’s office, which acknowledges receiving the notification. However, because I didn’t get it through the doctor’s office, the field in their system for the COVID vaccine remains blank; I can’t look up my vaccine status in MyChart (their electronic medical records system).
Yeah, I was really only posting for background information - for those who want to hear how the UK system works. I have no real understanding of the practicalities of the US healthcare system(s), but I had picked up that organising a US vaccine passport would be a much greater administrative challenge.
Still, there is a passport, I have one, at least some countries have health systems which permit its fairly straightforward introduction. It seems to work. If I ever get to cross a border again, I’ll find out for real. 
j
No one is talking about personal data including retinal scans and finger prints except you. Personal data means the information which is already printed in your passport - read your own link.
Are you telling me vaccine centres don’t keep electronic records of who they’ve vaccinated? What kind of operation are you lot running over there?
Who the hell is talking about this stuff, except you? All a vaccine passport needs is a record of who you are and what and when was the vaccine you got. Facial contours WTF. And presumably, if you don’t want to reveal your identity, then you don’t and you also don’t get a vaccine passport. That’s the deal with ID, you kinda have to say who your are.
Someone who doesn’t want an actual vaccination.
*SNIP San Vito & 'Everyone else per CDC
With specific exceptions, several Presidential proclamations suspend and limit entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of noncitizens who were physically present within the following countries during the 14-day period preceding their entry or attempted entry into the United States. For a full list of exceptions, please refer to the relevant proclamations in the links below.’
- China external icon
- Iranexternal icon
- European Schengen area external icon (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City)
- United Kingdom external icon (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)
- Republic of Ireland external icon
- Brazil external icon
- South Africaexternal icon
- Indiaexternal icon
A vaccine passport, to be secure and easily matched to the person bearing it, needs to contain some sort of biometric data. That can be a photograph digitized to meet facial recognition standards, such as the current US e-passport, or it can be some other sort of technology such as fingerprints. No matter what sort of biometrics it contains, however, the technology has to be available at the point where the vaccines are administered. That means every pharmacy and pop-up clinic needs facial recognition technology, for example, or fingerprint scanners or whatever other mechanism is chosen. Currently, fingerprint scanners are cheaper and easier to implement than facial recognition, but somebody somewhere has to make the decision and come up with the money to implement some sort of biometrics. Personal data, by itself, is NOT a solution, since the insecure and easily-forged vaccine card contains that.
Every vaccination center is keeping records, and probably most are doing so electronically. However, there is not a single national standard for what that electronic record needs to look like, which means exchanging records can be problematic. It is a legacy of the decentralized US health care system.
A vaccine passport that is merely a record of who I am and the what and when of the vaccine I received is a piece of paper (or cardstock). This entire thread is about how to make that record secure, which requires a little bit more. How do you propose to document definitively who I am, for example? The UK version mentioned by @Treppenwitz above, for example, “does some weird facial recognition thing to confirm that your face matches the photo ID”; that’s facial contours and measurements.
Ok. So you are proposing vaccination sites must have available the capacity to provide TWO kinds of documentation, to different standards, and also publicize that they are making that distinction and not accidentally (or accidentally on purpose) getting too much information about people who don’t want to reveal their identity. Is that correct?
In California they have been emphatic that you do not need ID to get vaccinated.
I’ve brought this up before in similar threads:
The issue that people are concerned about, and that will cause problems, is not someone having their vaccine information on a fake card. It’s someone having fake vaccine information in a form that is likely to be accepted. One way to address that is to make a format that would be hard to recreate be the standard, so that fake information is unlikely to be in a form that is likely to be accepted.
Another way to address the issue would be to make submitting fake vaccination information carry a heavy penalty. It’s fraud. Make it an aggravated level of fraud because it puts people at risk. Make it so that, if you do this, and someone gets Covid from you, that’s also a separate crime. And you’d have civil liability. Then, whenever people are submitting this kind of information, do spot checks or post checks to keep an eye on what the level of dishonest reporting is. Throw the book at people who are caught.
I think we should make the norm be that society needs to be able to rely on honest reporting of vaccination status. Therefore, it’s a breach of the social contract, and should be a crime, to be dishonest about it.
How would one prove, beyond a reasonable doubt (criminal standard of proof), who got COVID from whom? With such a large percentage of asymptomatic cases, for example, this modern Typhoid Mary may display no more evidence than the original.
(I do agree with your point that society needs to be able to rely on honest reporting of vaccination status, however.)
It may not always be possible, but contact tracing, plus, if it’s a big enough outbreak to warrant it, probably analysis of the particular virus to prove it’s the same one, could be enough. It will obviously depend on lots of circumstances. But if someone comes down with Covid and their recent contacts are tested, and fake-vaccination-card-guy is the only one that’s positive, and covid-victim is otherwise pretty risk-free, you’d have a good case, I think.
You’d still have the burden of proving that covid-victim didn’t pick it up from some random person at the grocery store or the soccer game and then transmitted it to fake-vaccination-card-guy. Sure, it may be unlikely, but it would probably be enough to create reasonable doubt, and since the end of stay-at-home orders and venue closures and widespread social distancing, contact tracing is a lot harder than it was in spring 2020 (even assuming fake-vaccination-card-guy is in fact the only known contact who is positive, or that you can find contacts to check°).
°"In some regions of the United States, more than half of people who test positive provide no details of contacts when asked."–Why many countries failed at COVID contact-tracing — but some got it right
Although back before everyone could get it, there were often clinic reservations made through your physician and your ID would be checked to prevent line-jumpers. Those records may have been kept, but may be difficult to access.
Even at that, it’s kept at your pediatrician’s office, and they can just print you out that record. Ther’e’s no formal vaccination record for children that I’m aware of.
Depends on the location - NYC and NYC have immunization registries ,although they were established only 15 or 20 years ago