How to Prove You’re Vaccinated for COVID-19

You may need to prove your vaccination status for travel or work, or to attend an event. Paper credentials usually work, but a new crop of digital verification apps is adding confusion.

Kaliya Young, an expert on digital identity verification working on the COVID Credentials Initiative, is also concerned that the rush to digitize important documents—including health cards and electronic driver’s licenses—will result in faulty designs.

“I’m happy about the digitization—just not happy about the failure to be discerning in those choices pushed by health IT people who don’t care about privacy pushing static QR codes like SMART Health Cards,” she says. Young says static QR codes can easily be copied by anyone who has access to them, and perhaps used by someone who is not the owner. “We will be stuck with bad systems that have baked within them privacy-infringing defaults.”