President Joe Biden’s administration is doubling down on its stance that a vaccine passport should come from the private sector. At a briefing today, White House Senior Advisor for COVID Response, Andy Slavitt, indicated that the government would develop guidelines for the private sector but stay out of the actual development of a vaccine passport.
Biden Administration Shies Away from Making a Vaccine Passport
As other countries around the world seek to implement a vaccine passport for their citizens, the Biden Administration has not viewed this act as their responsibility. Instead, the government wants that burden to fall to the private sector, where digital health passports have had some success.
Andy Slavitt stated the following at a COVID-19 Response Team briefing about the development of vaccine passports:
“We recognize this is a tricky and important subject, but the core here is that Americans, like people around the world who are vaccinated, will want to be able to demonstrate that vaccination in various forms. This is gonna hit all parts of society, so, naturally, the government is involved, but unlike other parts of the world, the government here is not viewing its role as the place to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens. We view this as something that the private sector is doing and will do. What’s important to us, and we’re leading an interagency process right now to go through these details, are that important criteria to be met with these credentials.”
The Guidelines for a Vaccine Passport
The government would rather create guidelines for what a vaccine passport should include. Mr. Slavitt outlined what the government wanted to see from the vaccine passports:
- Equitable access: ensuring that people, whether or not they have access to technology, could use a vaccine passport
- Privacy: storing health information is a sensitive topic, and companies need to handle this with the utmost care so people know their information is safe, secure, and is not shared broadly
- Free of cost: the government wants to see a free vaccine passport
- Multilingual: given the array of languages people speak in the United States, the government wants such passports to be available in multiple languages
The process for creating the guidelines is an inter-agency one. The government is taking information from multiple sources and experts, but Mr. Slavitt highlighted that the process for creating the guidelines was not impairing or slowing down the development of a private sector vaccine passport. Read more