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Don’t call it a vaccine passport, but California is now offering something very close.
State Departments of Public Health and Technology unveiled a website Friday that allows users who verify their identities to obtain digital copies of their Covid-19 vaccination record.
The site, called the Digital Covid-19 Vaccine Record Portal, is meant to be a digital backup of paper cards from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that Americans receive when they get a Covid-19 vaccine, said Amy Tong, the state’s chief information officer. officer.
It “provides Californians with a way to view and preserve their vaccine registry,” Tong said in a press call. “Instead of owning a card, if they want to have a digital copy of the same CDC card, this is your chance to do so.”
She said residents can take a screenshot of their history on the site if they want to avoid carrying a CDC card.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said the system does not constitute a “vaccine passport” that companies can use to filter out people who haven’t been vaccinated.
But California requires companies that host a mass indoor gathering, such as a large concert or sporting event, to verify that all participants either have tested negative recently for Covid-19 or have been vaccinated.
However, there is no national passport for the vaccine, and the Biden administration said there are no plans for that. While CDC cards were intended only as a way for an individual to keep track of their shots rather than as a way to verify that someone has been vaccinated, they have fallen behind in most parts of the country.
Some states, including Arizona, Florida and Texas, have issued executive orders requiring that no company be able to ask to know if a customer has been vaccinated.
New York is the only state that has an official application, called the Excelsior Pass, linked to its vaccination database. Vaccinated residents can use it to check their status to get to big places, and it’s actually a vaccine passport.
Although the California portal only functions as a website, not an app, it’s essentially the same thing, said Rick Claw, California’s chief technology innovation officer.
“This is conceptually very similar to what New York launched with the Excelsior Pass, which is an opportunity for a resident, in our case California, to obtain a digital copy of their vaccination record,” Claw said on the press call.
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