Vaccine Credential Technology Principles

Abstract: The historically rapid development of effective COVID-19 vaccines has policymakers facing evergreen public health questions regarding vaccination records and verification. Governments and institutions around the world are already taking action on digital vaccine certificates, including guidance and recommendations from the European Commission, the WHO, and the Biden Administration. These could be encouraging efforts: an effective system for vaccine certificates could potentially be part of a safe return to work, travel, and daily life, and a secure technological implementation could improve on existing systems to prioritize privacy, streamline access, and build for necessary interoperability across countries and contexts. However, vaccine credentials are not without potential harms, and, particularly given major inequities in vaccine access and rollout, there are valid concerns that they may be used in ineffective or exclusionary ways that exacerbate inequality, allow for discrimination, violate privacy, and assume consent. While the present moment calls for urgency, we must also acknowledge that choices made in the vaccine credentialing rollout for COVID-19 are likely to have long-term implications, and must be made with care. In this paper, we outline potential implementation and ethical concerns that may arise from tech-enabled vaccine credentialing programs now and in the future, and discuss the technological tradeoffs implicated in these concerns. We suggest a set of principles that, if adopted, may mitigate these concerns, forestall preventable harms, and point the way forward; the paper is structured as a deep dive into each of these principles.