Health ministry announces procedures for vaccine passport issuance

The COVID-19 vaccine certificates, which take effect from December 20, 2021, are to be issued for people who have received the primary course of one of eight types of COVID-19 vaccines licensed for use in Viet Nam, namely AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria, Gamaleya Research Institute’s Sputnik V, Sinopharm’s Vero Cell Inactivated along with the manufactured-in-UAE version Hayat-Vax, Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty, Moderna’s Spikevax, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen, and Cuba Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB)’s Abdala.

The QR code-based passport will be valid for 12 months.

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

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.

The vaccine passports have 11 fields of information including name, date of birth, nationality, targeted disease, doses of vaccines received, date of vaccination, lot number of the vaccine batch, type of vaccine, vaccine product received, the vaccine manufacturer, and a code for the certification.

National epidemic prevention and control apps (like PC-COVID or the e-health app Sức khoẻ điện tử) and other utility apps (if given permission by the individual users) could receive and store the vaccination certificates in the form of a QR code according to instructions for medical data sharing as regulated by the Ministry of Health.

As of December 20, over 140 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in Viet Nam with over 130 million given to the adult population (69.1 million first dose, nearly 60 million second doses, and upwards of 1 million third doses for Cuban Abdala vaccines), along with 40,524 additional doses and 241,237 booster shots.

Vie Nam recognized the vaccination certificates of 78 countries and territories, which were officially introduced by the foreign ministry.

By Khanh Phuong