The report comes as big U.S. airlines and nearly 30 travel and labor organizations are urging President Joe Biden to produce a standardized, government-backed credential to "accelerate safe economic activity and recovery."
"The U.S. must be a leader in this development," the groups wrote in a note to COVID-19 Recovery Team Coordinator Jeff Zients on Monday.
"The current diverse and fragmented digital health credentials used to implement different countries' air travel testing requirements risk causing confusion, reducing compliance, and increasing fraud."
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Zients and the Department of Health and Human Services are heading the work, according to sources who spoke with the Post. The White House refused to answer issues about the initiative and instead directed the news outlet to public statements made by Zients and other officials this month on the topic.
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"Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy," Zients said at a March 12 briefing.
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The initiative has given multiple challenges for the administration, including data privacy issues and healthcare equity. Additionally, at least 17 other initiatives are already undertaken.
The Vaccine Credential Initiative, a collaboration between tech and healthcare companies to develop technology that would store a secure copy of an individual’s vaccination record in a digital wallet on a person’s smartphone, is already in the works.
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"The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, want to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely - and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well," Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers, who is assisting the initiative, told the Post.
"Creating an environment for those vulnerable populations to get back to work safely - and to know that the people coming back to their business are ‘safe,’ and vaccinated - would be a great scenario."
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Some authorities say the moves are early.
"I think it's premature to be talking about how we get people these immunization certificates," L.J Tan, CSO at the Immunization Action Coalition, told the Advisory Board in January.
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"Our focus should be on getting people vaccinated. Once we get enough people vaccinated then we can leverage that vaccinated pool for analysis."
Nita Farany, a professor and director of the Initiative for Science & Society at Duke University, told Advisory she had concerns about passports forming a "two-tiered society" where individuals who haven’t received a vaccine don’t have access to public places and jobs versus those who are vaccinated.
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