COVID-19 Vaccine Certificates – Surely There’s A Better Way

COVID has revealed the cracks that we face as a nation. Individual states and territories have formulated their own response plans on how we respond to COVID. The vaccination rollouts, the quarantine methods, the lockdown measures and the contact tracing efforts; all of which will effectively lead the way on how we will return to a new world once this settles, integrating via QR codes and vaccination certification.

Some may suggest the rules and principles of the Federation need to be rewritten along with our constitution. To have Health and Education, perhaps the two most critical elements of our livelihoods, be managed by individual states is a notion that no longer stands. The need to have a national consensus, a national plan and a national funding model to ensure that there is a consistent approach to Health and Education is now required more than ever before.

This has been highlighted by our mediocre and differing responses from each state. Where is the central leadership? Where is the national guidance? Imagine how the wasted dollars being spent on duplicating platforms and other items could be saved and repurposed instead.

Can you believe that each state has rolled their own solution out, whether it be Services NSW, Services Victoria, QLD Unite and Recover, etc? And each solution, one way or another, does the same exact thing! We’ve all been asked to download our COVID-19 vaccination certificate and import it to our state check-in app, and this will be how we manage ourselves moving forward.

Each state with their own app and their own register – think about the millions of dollars being spent when the Federal Government could have rolled out their own national app instead? An app that did the exact same thing and gave contact tracers a genuine national solution!

Further to this, another way to simplify the whole notion around the COVID-19 vaccination certificates would be to open up the use of the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR). Companies are being pressed to gather proof of vaccinations amongst staff, contractors, volunteers, etc.

Rather than go down this path, the AIR could make an API available that would simply allow a document number and surname to be checked against the register which would then return either a ‘true’ or ‘false’ result. This would result in no capturing of certificates, no issues around forgeries and no collation of sensitive data. We would just have to pass a number and get a positive result – sounds easy, right? Well so far, our requests have fallen on deaf ears.

Thankfully, there are solutions such as vaccine management that can help make it easier for businesses and organisations to navigate the murky waters of providing evidence of COVID-19 Vaccination certificates. Find out more information by reading our article about providing evidence of COVID vaccinations in the workplace.