No One Actually Knows If You’re Vaccinated
If you have been fortunate enough to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, you also possess an essential, high-tech tool for proving your immunity to others.
Just kidding, it’s a piece of cardstock. On the flimsy rectangle that all Americans get with their shots, doctors and pharmacists record dates of administration, vaccine type, and lot number. Some scrawl the information by hand with a pen; others apply a preprinted sticker. The cards offer no special marker to prove their authenticity, no scannable code to connect to a digital record. At three by four inches, they’re even too awkwardly sized to fit in a wallet. A mid-century polio-vaccine card doesn’t look too different from today’s COVID-19 vaccination records.
Distributed by the CDC to those administering the vaccines, these cards are get the correct second dose, if needed, and offer a personal record, Jason Schwartz, a Yale public-health professor, told me. But they’ve taken on a considerably grander importance as pandemic restrictions have eased in the United States—especially now that the CDC has okayed vaccinated people in most places—because they’re the only thing available to all Americans that shows someone has been vaccinated. When you get a COVID-19 shot, the information goes into a digital record kept by the state where it was administered, and that’s the end of the road. The CDC does not hold records of individual vaccinations, and the White House has that it has no plans for a federal
