Vaccine passports to travel freely are still a dream—except in China – By Grady McGregor & Eamon Barrett (Future) / Mar 12 2021
After being cooped up for a year, people the world over are daring to dream about traveling internationally again. They see newly distributed COVID-19 vaccines as their long-awaited tickets to freedom, with the power to unlock closed borders and bypass soul-crushing hotel quarantines.
Freddy Chua, a Singaporean financier living in Hong Kong, told Fortune in February that the prospect of returning home motivated him to get vaccinated on the first day of Hong Kong’s vaccine campaign. “[My wife and I] hope that we won’t have to quarantine for 14 or 21 days” when visiting Singapore, Chua said.
But that fantasy will require paperwork: a so-called vaccine passport that will validate an individual’s inoculated status and liberate them from pandemic-era travel restrictions.
Policymakers and health officials have teased such documentation and the freedom of movement it could bestow as reasons to get a COVID-19 vaccine. But the practical challenges of rolling out a vaccine passport—Should it be analog or digital? Is it universally recognized? What about privacy concerns?—mean its tantalizing promise is proving difficult to realize.
CONTINUE > https://fortune.com/2021/03/12/covid-vaccine-passports-travel-us-china-europe-eu-singapore/
