Gov’t To Introduce Digital COVID-19 Vaccination Card

Minister of Health and Wellness, Dr. the Hon. Christopher Tufton, says the Government is working on developing a digital coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination card, which should be available to Jamaicans within the next two to three months.

“We are currently in the exploratory mode. We are working with a number of international partners, among them the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), which, of course, is the software platform we currently use to upload the information around persons who have been vaccinated,” he said, while addressing Thursday’s (September 30) virtual Covid Conversations press briefing.

Dr. Tufton said that the Ministry is seeking to have the card modelled off best practices and standards seen in Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States (US) “and that is, of course, to establish the compatibility and, by extension, the acceptability of the card”,

He said that the card will feature a QR code that will be “securely encrypted”, and persons will be able to print their QR Code or have it available digitally via short message service (SMS) or email. “So, it is a code that can be read by a machine where the data can be uploaded or verified,” he pointed out.

Dr. Tufton said it is expected that persons who already have a physical vaccination card will be transitioned to the digital format.

He said that the card will be critical in managing the vaccination process and provide Jamaicans with a universally accepted card, while reducing fraud.

“We have seen cases of persons allegedly having fake vaccine cards and we have heard anecdotes around the cost, and that is increasingly becoming a challenge,” he said.

In addition, he said that “the announcement in other jurisdictions that vaccination is going to be required for visitors does require, as part of the infrastructure, a card that is going to be universally accepted and validated and where the possibility of fraudulently producing a card is minimised if not totally eliminated”.

“The same approach is taken with a passport, for example, which has digital reading… to capture the data of travel history and so on,” he pointed out.