Vaccine Passports
As COVID-19 vaccination rates increase in some countries, there’s talk of a vaccine passport: a certificate that you’ve been vaccinated, which then allows you access to certain activities (travel, work, gym, school etc). Others argue against it pointing out that fraud apart, the vaccines have never been rigorously tested: how long are they effective? What if the passport gives a false sense of well-being, thereby causing caution to be thrown to the wind? The vaccine passport should logically be a digital app. Ironically, I find that it’s the West that doesn’t have a solution to solve the question of unifying (1) Who you are, (2) Have you been vaccinated?, (3) Is this your phone?. Amusingly, this is an area where India and China are better placed, thanks mainly to the fact that they started building their systems in the Internet/smartphone age (think Aadhar) whereas Western systems are pre-Internet/pre-smartphone era relics! Then again, there’s Israel, a hi-tec coun...