The Push to Keep Digital Vaccine Passports From Becoming a Mess

For the past several weeks, New Yorkers have been able to download a QR code onto their phones—or print out an analog copy of it—that vouches for the fact that they’ve received the Covid-19 vaccine or a negative test result for the virus.

Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden and other local venues are already testing the Excelsior Pass, as the code is known, to screen people for admission to events. It’s one of the first attempts in the U.S. to use “vaccine passports” to help reopen the economy. But Paul Meyer, head of a nonprofit organization that works on digital health standards, is pushing to make sure that New York’s initiative and others like it don’t lock their health data up in walled gardens, preventing other passports from accessing it.