As more and more jurisdiction is moving forward toward some form of vaccine proof for non essential venue, Quebec solution “Vaxicode/Vaxiverif” , pretty standard, run of the mill Smart Health Card (SHC) implementation, is now active (September 1), with a break-in period of 15 days .
On the technical side of things, it’s a basic asymmetric cryptography system, so the QR code is signed with a private key, and verified with a public key.
The very first implantation of the client software (Vaxicode), for IOS, had some technical trouble, in layman terms, the software was accepting a new jurisdiction public key, so basically, you could use your own private/public keys to create your own QR code, and the app will show the result as valid . It was a problem with the implementation, not the principle of SDH, and was fixed before the official break-in period. (Write-up, in french about that)
The verifying application (Vaxiverif), is completely offline, as it doesn’t need any internet access to verify s QR code, of course we will test it for sure, but with the exception of updating the app and the possible rules set, everything should be able to work without internet access .
So now we need to see how those solutions will eventually work together, as for the use of a common framework (SHC), it’s still not clear how it will work for foreign vaccinal proof. Vaxiverif use an hardcoded public key, it’s not impossible that eventually the app will have a whitelist of jurisdiction, that could be used to verify, New-York use SHC too, so we will need to see the use case on that, from what i get (I’m not a programmer) it’s possible …
The rest of Canada is following Quebec right now, British Columbia, Ontario, already announced the implantation of a proof of vaccination system …
On the other hand, this solution will only be as good as the people implementing it, France use a “Pass Sanitaire” (Health pass), but a lot of business owner don’t verify it (Or verify it partially, without verifying the identity) , so the implantation is not optimal, because people don’t feel the need to get vaccinated to have access to a lot of business, some owner, follow the rules, but from what i heard, it’s really not at a high percentage.
Now come the politics of it, somehow, some people seem to think it’s strictly to curb directly the transmission of Covid-19, well this is just not true, being vaccinated, help to curb the transmission, this is a fact, we don’t know the exact number yet, but some early study talk about 29 time more likely to get covid-19 if you are not vaccinated, but even if you are fully vaccinated, you can still catch it, and transmit it (With even less chance of suffering any ill effect of Covid-19).
A big reason to have a vaccination proof system, is to push people to get vaccinated, vaccine work (At least for now), against all variant, some great indication are out there, San Diego, with a fairly high vaccination rate, had 534 hospitalize people between 7/12/2021 and 8/10/2021 (Hate american date format) , 13 fully vaccinated, 521 not fully vaccinated, and again we are talking about a jurisdiction that is mostly vaccinated (High 70%) . (Ref)
So in a sense it’s to push people to get vaccinated, because without it, you can’t go to restaurants , cinemas, Live Shows, etc. Some people can say it’s deceptive, but it’s a little bit like the mask back at the beginning, not wanting people to buy an use all the PPE, they said that it was not “yet” necessary, half truth, not technically a lie, in the sense that a lot of place was under pretty strict lockdown, but some people took that as the mask don’t work, but we now know that it is a fairly good mitigation measure .
Let’s hope that a variant will not find a way to render the Vaccine ineffective, it would be a disaster of catastrophic proportions, and every person it infects, make that possibility more and more likely.