One wonders how the hell vaccine passports happened so quickly. The planning started some time ago.
In a 2018 article on Medium, a group that partners with the United Nations, Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation, called ID2020 wrote that vaccination programs created a “huge opportunity to scale digital identity”.
This is what ID2020 wrote:
Immunization poses a huge opportunity to scale digital identity — in many developing countries, immunization coverage greatly exceeds birth registration rates. According to best available estimates, upwards of 95% of children globally receive at least one dose of one vaccine (with 86% of children globally receiving the full three doses recommended of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine, which is commonly used to measure immunization coverage).
When a child receives her first vaccine, she receives a paper child health card. In many developing countries, the most common form of identification is not a birth certificate, but this card. The near ubiquity of these documents presents an enormous opportunity.
