Viet Nam will begin handing out ‘vaccine passports’ to those who had already received enough COVID-19 vaccine shots from April 15, according to the Ministry of Health.

Viet Nam will begin issuing vaccine passports from April 15. IN THE PHOTO: The 'Vaccine passport' item will be updated on the PC-Covid app from April 15. Photo: DAC MANH

According to a leading representative of the Health Data Center under the Ministry of Health, Viet Nam's vaccine passport entails info like one's name, date of birth, the disease which they're vaccinated against, number of shots and date of vaccination. Data will be encoded into a QR code.

The vaccine passport will be used in conjunction with other personal identification documents like ID cards. Data that identify people will not be encoded into QR codes for security reasons.

The vaccine passport's QR code will expire after 12 months. Following their expiry, people will be notified and a new QR code will be created instead.

The passport will be available on people's PC Covid-19 or Digital Health (So suc khoe dien tu) apps. If people don’t have the apps, they can get their passports by accessing a health ministry website, to be available this week, and filling in necessary information.

People won’t have vaccine passports if either their vaccination info is wrong or they’re not fully vaccinated. Therefore, people are advised to re-check their vaccination info themselves to report errors.

The issuance of the vaccine passports is applied uniformly across vaccination sites in the country, following three-step procedures, according to the Ministry of Health.

First, vaccination sites are asked to review and verify the information of people to whom they have administered vaccines.

Second, vaccination sites will conduct ‘digital signing’ of vaccination records on the national platform for COVID-19 vaccination management used by health authorities, which will share its data with the management system for certification of vaccinations against COVID-19.

Third, the Department of Preventive Medicine (Ministry of Health) digitally signs the COVID-19 vaccine certificates. The certificates are then issued using QR codes in accordance with EU regulatory standards.

In Da Nang, the municipal Department of Health has just sent an official dispatch to request relevant units to implement a number of related contents to serve the issuance of ‘vaccine passports’ for local residents.

Specifically, the municipal Department of Health has requested relevant units to urgently update the missing vaccinations on the software https://tiemchungcovid19.moh.gov.vn, as well as review and supplement of false and missing information of vaccinated people on the vaccination platform.

Also, the units have been asked to send the list of incorrect or missing information to district-level medical centers, as well as to coordinate with the local police for verifying and supplementing false and missing information.

Heed will be paid to conducting ‘digital signing’ of vaccination records on the national platform for COVID-19 vaccination management used by health authorities.

District-level medical centres have been urged to coordinate with the local police to verify COVID-19 vaccination information to share with the National Database on Population.

The city's Centre for Disease Control has been directed to monitor the progress of information processing and daily data summarisation of Covid-19 vaccination units. It has been requested to guide people to use the function of Reflecting vaccination information on the COVID-19 Immunisation Portal at https://tiemchungcovid19.gov.vn in case of errors in COVID-19 vaccination information and the ‘Vaccine passport’ lookup function.

Reporting by DAC MANH - Translating by M.DUNG