Safety Signs Blog

Vaccine Passports or Immunity Passports are they coming in the near future?

14th January 2021 |

Will businesses and employers be able to / need to ask for a vaccine passport?

Covid-19 has been around for over a year and attention is turning to how the world of work and retail will respond to new strains of the virus and to changes to lockdowns as vaccinations roll out.

While vaccines offer new hope, to be truly effective they require 60 to 80% of the population to be vaccinated, but this may prove logistically challenging in the short term.

Vaccine hesitancy also poses a problem in the UK, where 72% of people are willing to take the vaccine, 16% are very unsure, and 12% are strongly hesitant(1). In some areas of the US, upto 40% of frontline workers are turning down vaccinations(2).

Workplaces and public venues are faced with challenges to keep people safe in the short term and manage a mix of people with Covid Immunity and those without.

Mandatory vaccination as well as being undesirable, is not ethically allowable as medical procedures require consent. But there is some evidence that mandating vaccines by refusing access to schools etc. can work and have been shown to increase vaccine uptake(3).

For business there are probably three actions they can take.

1) Vaccine or Immunity Passports:

There are already some institutions developing vaccine passporting either as apps or as physical documents. These might be used to gain access to countries or to access medical facilities currently. In the future however it may be that venues will allow exclusive access to holders of these passports allowing their clientele to feel more relaxed that they are in a safe environment. We have produced a range of signs that can be used for these purposes.

2) Requiring negative covid tests.

The UK government recently introduced this requirement for inbound international travel. There are also a number of medical institutions that require negative Covid tests before inpatient treatments. We have produced a range of “Negative Covid test required” signs for this purpose.

3) Something else!

We have been supplying signage throughout the pandemic. Right from the very first days when the response was largely focussed around hand washing and encouraging people not to shake hands, before social distance, 2m rules or mask wearing was introduced. Things have certainly been changing rapidly! To support this we are providing a range of custom signs with immunity or virus passport type symbols to allow you to adapt to what your business or organisation decides to do.

1. https://www.technologynetworks.com/biopharma/news/72-percent-of-uk-population-willing

-to-get-the-covid-19-vaccine-343879

2 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/10/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-us-

health-workers

3 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4704

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