Originally Posted by
Hartington
I feel there may be some ambiguity in the word "passport". It is arguable that we need not only a solution for international travel but for domestic purposes too.
Staying with the passport as an international document it has been suggested here that you need data space in the chip on the passport. I disagree. Think about the ESTA (and for that matter a US visa). That isn't loaded onto the chip. The passport is scanned at the airport and a message is sent to the US to ask if the pasenger is OK to travel. You don't need anything other than details already on the chip. You arrive at US immigration and the scan the passport again and they could quite easily send a message to the UK database "is this person vaccinated?". XML across the internet (plus some security) and it's done.
I've used the US and the UK as an example but the principle should be possible worldwide.
Sounds easy, in practice it would be very difficult.
What you have described is a bilateral arrangement whereby the passport issuing authority (say the UK) who have encoded the chip with your ID have to supply the country you are travelling to (say the USA) with proof of the the vaccination status of the passport holder.
That would work fine for the two countries involved (and possibly reciprocally).
But multiply that by all the combinations of passport issuing authorities, vaccinating nations and countries that travellers want to go to, and it rapidly becomes extremely complicated.
IHMO, the only way such a worldwide system has even a chance of being implemented is under the auspices of ICAO, or even its parent the UN. I'm not holding my breath.