Digital vaccine card system should be ready in early 2022 – Health Minister

About five months after he announced that the local health authorities were moving towards digital COVID-19 vaccine cards, Minister of Health Dr. Frank Anthony now says that the digitalised system should be up and running in the first quarter of this year.

On Thursday, during his daily COVID-19 update, the Health Minister noted that the local health authorities had been working with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to secure the specialised equipment needed to start the process.

The equipment needed includes specialised printers to print the digitalised cards and computers.

“… we expect that we will get delivery of those special equipment to print the new cards within the first quarter of this year,” the Health Minister said.

Previously, the News Room reported that Guyana’s paper-based COVID-19 vaccination system, inclusive of printed vaccine ‘blue books’, led to some challenges of forgery and fraud.

But Dr. Anthony said that most of the physical registers that have people’s COVID-19 vaccination information written on them have been secured by the Health Ministry and much of the information has already been converted to a digital format.

“A lot of the work has already been completed,” Dr. Anthony assured members of the public.

Over the past few months, individuals have been caught with blank, unstamped ‘COVID-19 books’.

These booklets are the proof of vaccination issued by the Ministry of Health when an individual receives a COVID-19 vaccine but several people have been illegally obtaining, forging and selling these blank booklets.

And so, the Minister previously noted that the new digitised cards would prevent these forgeries from occurring.

It is also expected that with these new vaccine cards, revaccination (the process of getting a completely new set of vaccines even though you are fully vaccinated) can be better managed.