The Good, The Bad, & The Invasive: The Impact of Vaccine Registries, Day Passes, & Passports

As lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines become widely available, governments and companies are deploying electronic vaccine credentials in the hopes of mitigating the risk of disease transmission. While S.T.O.P. sees some potential value of digital vaccine passports for international travel, we caution such a measure could exacerbate the isolation of lower-income countries with limited vaccine access. Furthermore, S.T.O.P. rejects domestic vaccine apps, which pose a potent threat to civil rights, equity, and privacy. Such vaccine apps should not be conflated with traditional, one-time vaccine registries (such as those used in schools) which remain one of the most powerful tools available to public health officials.

Vaccine Passports for International Travel

Vaccine passports use travelers’ COVID-19 vaccination records and/or test results to demonstrate compliance with border entry requirements. Digital vaccine apps are an extension of the familiar "Yellow Card" vaccine credential, used to mitigate the introduction of communicable diseases by travelers for some eighty years. Both public and private sector entities are seeking to create digital Yellow Card for COVID-19 and other diseases. These efforts include the WHO’s “smart yellow card,” Clear’s CommonPass, and the EU’s Green Certificate.

Requiring COVID-19 vaccine passports may help some isolated, wealthy countries limit the introduction of new COVID-19 cases and variants. In the United States, vaccine passports likely won’t meaningfully harm travelers’ privacy given existing surveillance of international travel. However, such measures will compound the humanitarian cost of many wealthier countries’ vastly disproportionate purchase of available vaccine doses. Requiring COVID-19 vaccine passports before poorer countries are able to begin widespread vaccination will exacerbate inequality. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a global vaccine passport standard could be deployed during the course of this pandemic.

Domestic Vaccine Apps

Much like vaccine passports, domestic vaccine apps are marketed as a way for businesses to verify a customer’s COVID-19 vaccine and/or testing status. These apps include Israel's Green Pass, IBM’s Digital Health Pass, the state of New York’s Excelsior Pass (based on the IBM platform), and Clear’s CommonPass. In contrast to vaccine passports, domestic vaccine apps pose a much more potent threat to equity, civil rights, and privacy.

Vaccine apps appear just as insecure as paper records. Apps like the Excelsior pass are easily forged, while technical limitations block many fully-vaccinated people from successfully enrolling. Also, rather than boosting vaccination, domestic vaccine apps are further politicizing vaccination and undermining trust in the vaccine.

Alarmingly, vaccine apps would punish the low-income, BIPOC, immigrant, and LGBTQ people because of their limited access to the vaccine. Many of the Americans we have systematically mistreated during the pandemic will see heath inequity transformed into a new form of digital segregation.

Vaccine apps pose a potent safety risk, creating a new, inescapable layer of geolocation tracking that threatens BIPOC and undocumented people. These apps collect data without any protections against misuse of that information by police or ICE. Furthermore, it is unclear what security measures each app is taking to safely store user data.

Traditional Vaccine Registries

Traditional one-time vaccine registries are a singularly effective public health tool. The most common example is school-based vaccine registries, which require vaccine documentation no more than once per year. Traditional registries introduce minimal surveillance and equity concerns, particularly if they are rolled out when a larger portion of the population has had the opportunity to obtain the COVID-19 vaccine. For these reasons, the continued use of vaccine registries should not be conflated with the debate over vaccine apps.

For more information on vaccine apps, see our report. Supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations and by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.