The Atlantic: The Vaccine Cards Are the Wrong Size

From The Atlantic: When you hold one of the vax cards, you can see how people would immediately misunderstand it as something that’s meant to be kept on your person. Although too big for a wallet, they’re also too small to easily keep track of outside a wallet. “It’s absolutely the wrong size,” Alison Buttenheim, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who has studied vaccine documentation, told me. She noted that the cards don’t match the dimensions of any other common vaccine documentation she knows of, including the yellow booklet that the World Health Organization uses for international travelers, which is bigger. As we were talking, Buttenheim briefly misplaced her own folded-over vaccination card; it slid a little too far into one of her wallet’s compartments. (At this point, I should admit that I again lost mine in my apartment for most of a day after getting it out to examine for this article.)

A better option, Buttenheim told me, might have involved two pieces: a larger document with information about follow-up appointments and side effects, for example, which would have cut down on the amount of stuff that needed to go on a more durable, wallet-size, and ideally harder-to-fake plastic card. Such a system would also avoid data-privacy concerns that can come with smartphone-app verification systems, as well as the accessibility issues inherent in requiring people to own a smartphone to prove their ability to work or access services. Those requirements are the hardest on the poor or elderly, for whom COVID-19 poses the greatest health risk. And the technology for some of those apps is, uh, still being refined. New York City’s smartphone verification app—not to be confused with New York State’s Excelsior Pass, or its new Excelsior Plus Pass—appears to accept photos of restaurant menus as proof of vaccination. A spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that’s because the city’s app doesn’t verify anything; it simply gives users a place to store a photo of their vaccine card.

Read the full story in The Atlantic.