Vaccine passports: Pandemic spurs rise of portable health records
On a snowy April morning, Laurie Riley is heading to Aruba. Prior to the pandemic, she would come to Boston’s Logan Airport with her ticket and passport. Now, she also carries her COVID-19 test results before boarding the flight. She printed them out and also put them on an app in her cellphone, called CommonPass.
In Aruba, the pass will give her access to dedicated immigration lanes designed to speed her through.
“It does seem a little bit 1984,” says Ms. Riley of the app. “But everything now seems like 1984. My fingerprints are out there. My ID.” Ms. Riley, a middle school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says she doesn’t mind the technology “if it keeps everyone safer.”
The coronavirus has quickly advanced on an international scale something many U.S. health professionals have dreamed about even as privacy advocates have fretted: portable health records. Digitized and accessible to any health provider a customer chooses,
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