COVID-19 Digital Vaccination Certificates and Digital Technologies: Lessons from Digital Contact Tracing Apps

Abstract

The successful development of COVID-19 vaccines accelerates global post-pandemic recovery by vaccinating populations, targeting priority groups to reduce secondary transmission. This facilitates relaxation of imposed restrictions on international and regional travel, tourism industry, education sectors and other aspects of social life. The vaccination process is done by targeting priority groups to reduce secondary transmission and uncertainties triggered by emerging COVID-19 variants. Vaccinated people are given certificates (cards) that contain COVID-19 vaccination details and health facility. These traditional vaccination cards can be forged, altered, issued corruptly, sometimes difficult to read by non-health experts, and also they can easily get torn and lost. Hence, the relevance of robust, secure, tamper-proof, privacy-preserving and validated COVID-19 digital vaccination certificates is proliferating. However, just like contact tracing apps, COVID-19 digital vaccination certificates are not immune to emerging impediments that affect their adoption, acceptance and usage. Therefore, this paper presents opportunities and challenges pertaining to the adoption of COVID-19 digital vaccination certificates. Also, this paper provides a pioneering review of digital technologies that could be utilized to develop COVID-19 digital vaccination certificates while introspecting at their limitations. Based on this, the study proposes ethical values regard to the acceptable use of COVID-19 digital vaccination certificates.