Once the vaccination effort in the United States picked up steam, with it came the promise of a return to normalcy, a reopening of society. People would be able to safely congregate again, go to concerts, sporting events, restaurants, travel, even go back to work. The ticket? A vaccine passport, proof of inoculation or the presence of antibodies.
But with this promise comes many questions, especially in a country where there is no centralized identification system, where a myriad of public, private and non-profit institutions are involved in the vaccine effort, where many people do not have ID, and even if they did, in many cases they were not asked for it when they went to get vaccinated. Moreover, according to a recent industry panel I attended on the subject, only about half of the US states have health systems that would enable the verification of identity and the maintenance of verifiable digital health records.