Where are the standardized vaccine cards? Mayor Binay asks

Makati Mayor Abby Binay. Screenshot from My Makati Facebook page.

MANILA, Philippines — Makati City Mayor Abby Binay on Wednesday took health and communications officials to task over the continuing absence of “standardized’’ vaccination cards four months since the launch of the national inoculation drive against COVID-19.

The Department of Health (DOH) and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) are supposed to issue digital vaccination cards under the COVID-19 Vaccination Program Act of 2021 signed in February this year.

“The plan of the DICT has remained a plan because they couldn’t give any [vaccination cards]. Ideally even before the national government implemented it, the vaccination program should have been centralized, but it did not happen,” Binay said in a radio interview.

Outdated records

Sought for comment, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said: “This initiative is being led by DICT. And yes, [we] may move to make the vax card uniform. We are requesting updates regarding this.’’

The DICT, for its part, said it could not yet issue digital vaccination cards, blaming outdated records from local governments and its own “systems.’’ It said the issuance of a vaccine certificate of record was “temporarily held in abeyance.”

“The records are presently being updated by the local governments and we continue to support the efforts to keep all vaccine records current, harmonized, and up to date,” the DICT said in a statement.

Without providing details, it said efforts were ongoing to enhance systems “in order to improve the public’s ease of use and convenience.”

Security features

A standardized card has become a necessity after the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases said on Sunday that fully vaccinated individuals traveling within the country could already skip tests for COVID-19 as long as they could present domestic vaccination cards from a legitimate establishment or a certificate of quarantine completion, possibly from the Bureau of Quarantine.

Binay said the Makati local government has been swamped with requests for city-issued vaccination cards as well as vaccine certificates from residents who plan to travel abroad.

“The national government did not give specific instructions on what the vaccination [card] should look like or if it would have security features,” she said. “As you can see, each LGU has their own style of vaccine card. We each ended up developing our own systems. It’s chaotic.”

Each of the 17 cities and municipalities in Metro Manila has its own vaccination card, with designs and styles suited to the mayor’s trademark colors.

Makati’s immunization cards contain security features such as a unique QR code and embedded watermark to prevent any counterfeit, Binay said. —WITH REPORTS FROM PATRICIA DENISE M. CHIU AND MIGUEL CAMUS INQ