Vaccine Passports Are Latest Victim of Sloppy Government Data

From its very first days, the Covid crisis was a data disaster as well as a public health one. After two decades of e-government boosterism, most countries, even developed ones, have thousands of government-run databases that don’t talk to each other, are too slow to yield the insights necessary to manage a crisis of these proportions and lack transparency. This technological failure — or, rather, failure of political will — has likely added to the virus’s death toll and deepened the economic recession. Now comes yet more evidence that governments remain woefully and dangerously behind the curve when it comes to managing data: the struggle to create the vaccine passports that could speed an economic reopening.

One of the earliest manifestations of failure was the inability of governments to track basic data about the starting pandemic — infection and transmission rates, the number of hospital beds and lung machines in use, excess mortality — in real time or at least on a daily basis. Months into the crisis, the data on deaths in European countries were still days behind the actual death toll. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported in late 2020 that only three out of 16 European countries it surveyed had hospital and emergency care data that were updated either daily or weekly, and only two had mortality data in real time. Most of the world’s wealthy nations, even the few that have standardized medical records, lacked the ability to extract generalized data from them that could be useful in predicting and informing responses.