Love this in JAMA this week:
[T]o facilitate verification of vaccination status and to better track postvaccination infections, there needs to be an electronic vaccine certificate platform. Relying on forgeable paper cards is unacceptable in the 21st century. Current state immunization information systems are incomplete, fragmented, and not interoperable, hindering national efforts to control the virus. A national electronic vaccine certificate platform is needed, such as the SMART Health Card, that ensures interoperability across states and countries, safeguards individual privacy, and is based on open-source technology publicly available for vetting to help satisfy any concerns over government surveillance.
One of my big projects at CDT has been the work on California’s Digital Vaccine Record system (more about that below in a Twitter thread from me from last month), which led to me getting involved in the Vaccine Credential Initiative, the organization responsible for the development of the SMART Health Cards framework. It’s exciting to see the awareness of VCI’s work on COVID-19 vaccination verification grow, and lead more leaders to point to it as an example that could become the foundation on which a truly national approach to vaccine verification could be built.