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May 7 - 20, 2021
Greater Wilmington Business Journal
wilmingtonbiz.com
| HEALTH CARE |
Vaccination ‘passports’ come into focus BY NEIL COTIAUX astleBranch, the Wilmington-based consumer reporting agency, touts its status as “one of the first companies in the world” to issue a COVID-19 vaccination ID card. The digital pass, which provides proof of vaccination to third parties, allows someone to enter a business, school, concert, sporting event or other site that may require such certification. CastleBranch’s “passport” is one of a growing number of pandemic-driven certification cards entering the marketplace. They are expected to become more commonplace as government, health care and business leaders pursue new ways to boost the number of individuals getting vaccinated while reigniting the economy and returning society to more normal conditions. Officials at CastleBranch and its competitors have high hopes for the digital cards, which federal and state officials stress are not compulsory.
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But with the passports still in infancy – CastleBranch launched its on Jan. 14 – it remains to be seen how many businesses and individuals will use them. A number of vaccine verification apps have been developed since CastleBranch’s version, but pushback over privacy concerns and government agencies overstepping authority have slowed a more rapid adoption. Still, organizations ranging from universities to employers have started discussing their use. European officials in late April began announcing that they would start easing travel restrictions on Americans, a plan based on coming up with systems for verifying proof of vaccinations. Nearly a third of North Carolinians are fully vaccinated, according to the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, qualifying them for a passport. At CastleBranch, interested individuals typically begin the process using a scanned version of the signed paper card they received at the vaccination site, which the company says,
IMAGES C/O CASTLEBRANCH
Certification card: Wilmington-based CastleBranch in January launched a vaccination ID card product.
“can be easily forged, destroyed or lost.” The firm’s employees then get to work confirming the vaccine manufacturer, the dates doses were administered and verifying the user’s identity “consistent with state and federal privacy laws,” a company
overview states. The card contains tools such as microtext and holographic film to deter fraud as well as “physical identifiers” such as the cardholder’s height, with CastleBranch promising that private data “will never be shared or collected in a database and distributed to third parties” by the company. The passport is the size of a driver’s license and is paired with a unique access code that, when the cardholder grants permission, can electronically verify the individual’s identity, vaccination status, and be used to view validated primary-source vaccine documents. The cost of the passport is $19.95. Competition in the vaccine-verification space is growing. Companies including Microsoft and Salesforce are taking a joint approach to encrypting vaccination records and are coordinating their efforts with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. For its part, Walmart will provide customers with digital access to personal health data “be-
