Passport to the world

• Published date: 28 March 2021
• Date: 28 March 2021

The Customs officer checks your passport while you use your phone to scan a QR code that instantly relays all of your health information.

A green tick flashes to show you’ve been vaccinated and aren’t carrying Covid-19, and the official stamps and hands your passport back.

Welcome back to the rest of the world.

Sounds simple, right?

Not quite.

What is a vaccine passport?With the roll-out of vaccines around the globe, countries are under mounting pressure from the airline and business sectors to reopen international travel.

And “vaccine passports” are touted as the key to unlock the world.

Broadly, we can think of these as a certificate to prove we’ve been vaccinated, much like a regular passport certifies our identity and nationality.

That’s a similar but separate concept from infection or “immunity” passports, which refer to tests demonstrating that we’re either not infected with, or are immune to, Covid-19.

Along with other airlines, Air New Zealand is preparing to trial the International Air Transport Association (IATA)’s Travel Pass app, beginning with Auckland-Sydney flights at some point next month.

At the same time, New Zealand is working with the World Health Organisation on the development of global standards for vaccine certification.

The Government has also been closely following the work of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) — the UN’s air travel policy arm — which last week said vaccinations shouldn’t be a pre-requisite for global travel.

“As 99 per cent of overseas travel to New Zealand is by air, how the aviation system interacts with the international vaccine roll-out will be of critical importance to us,” Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins told the Herald on Sunday.

“Whatever system New Zealand travellers use, it will likely be a digitally based health passport which stores and shares all vaccination and testing information, in a secure fashion, with the health and border entry authorities of the countries people travel to.”

How will it work?The problems that swirled around early efforts to deliver a tracing app for New Zealand showed just how challenging it can be to rapidly build and roll out any new system at scale.

So, it’s not hard to imagine the Gordian knot the developers of the Travel Pass have faced in trying to create a single, end-to-end solution that can be used from one jurisdiction to another.

Not only has the IATA had to overcome the Byzantine complexities inherent in requirements for entry and exit — with a range of...