After working in a primary care provider's office for over a decade, we were NEVER contacted by any of the surrounding schools to verify the vaccination records we provided to many patients and their families. Maybe it is unworkable to have an expectation that vaccine-passports will be any more stringently double-checked. Theater here it comes.
I wouldn't expect it either. If all the patients go to the various local school systems, they know what the forms look like, what's real, they've got tons of examples that are all the same. A fake would stand out. It would have to be some some patient that moves away and registers for an out of area school. Even then, unless something looked really funky with what was presented they probably wouldn't call. Maybe do a phone book or web lookup that the form was from a real doctor. There just isn't enough incentive to lie for that type of use compared to the risk of a lie being found out later. All those things would have to go bad for someone to call, funky form presented to school out of area that's doesn't match a simple lookup and from someone taking the risk they'll get kicked out of school for faking it.
Getting to go to a movie or restaurant and not need to use any obnoxious mitigation measures with zero repercussion for lying? Sure, I went to a mass vaccination by my in-laws in another state while helping them. That's why my CDC form looks different than everyone else. Is the person working the door going to make a scene?
That's not an accurate assessment of liability. If the venue didn't "screw up," they're not liable. I assume you're talking about a negligence action. No business stands as an absolute insurer against something going wrong - they are only held to a specific standard of care. The vaccine passport company will presumably adopt procedures to ensure the accuracy of the information given them, and those procedures should be sufficient to withstand most attempts to subvert it. If they are negligent in adopting substandard procedures, there could be liability, assuming all other legal requirements are met. If they fail to accurately carry out those procedures, there could be liability. But the fact that someone found a way around the system, in and of itself, is not enough to establish liability.
They may totally win. The should win. They should pin the liability on the person that lied. But, they're going to get sued. They've got the money.
Where we are today, with a 40,000,000+ fully vaccinated and NONE of them have suitable proof that cannot be easily faked. There are distributed back end disparate records that could provide that proof, but it'll be super expensive to leverage the information.
It's that expense that's the problem and the effort to take it on. For international travel, where you already have the expense of a passport, and maybe even a visa, it's a different calculation. I think we'll have them there, those systems can afford the cost. Anything that can leverage those systems can also take advantage then. But, nobody in the US is going to get a real passport or update it with vaccine information just to go out to dinner.
Hopefully we'll have enough people vaccinated that transmission falls through the floor long before the work to do all the Vaccine Passport steps could even be completed. Which is part of the reason to not bother. By the time the system was built and the data vetted, it wouldn't even be needed. Optimistic here, we're good by summer. More pessimistic, it's takes till winter. Most possible pessimistic, we never get there, then the work required and cost for passport would start to make sense.
www.reuters.com
