Search results

The purpose of this study is to investigate the applications of blockchain in vaccine passport solution. The world is facing an unprecedented situation because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries have witnessed sporadic lockdown and travel restrictions and it has marred trade and tourism. As the mass vaccination has started the life is slowly and steadily returning to true normal. Various countries are issuing vaccination passports to manage the immunization information and validate it. To realize vaccine-passport’s true potential, security and privacy concerns should be being taken care of. There is a need for studies to evaluate the emerging technology for the vaccine passport.

This study uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve its objective. This study uses a systematic literature review to analyze the potential of blockchain for vaccine passports. The case study of three different types of organizations implementing blockchain for vaccine passports was analyzed and results were presented. Last but not least, focus group discussion and search of secondary literature was to done to identify scientific, ethical and legal challenges associated with the use of vaccine passports. The method used for calculating the importance score of these challenges was analytical hierarchy process.

This study concludes that blockchain-based solutions are very suitable for vaccine passports and addresses the concern related to interoperability, privacy and security. The case study approach was used to elaborate the use of blockchain in three different options available for the vaccine. Last but not least, this study identifies the challenges faced by vaccine passport programs and suggests measures to overcome them. This study concludes that the ethical challenges associated with vaccine passports are more important and should be preferentially treated.

This study is timely and will be he lpful for policymakers in designing the vaccine passport programs. It gives valuable insight to decision-makers evaluating technologies for the development of vaccine passport programs. This study identifies nine challenges to be tackled to making a vaccine passport program successful.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is not able to find out a review on the use of blockchain technology for vaccine passports, and this study attempts to fill this gap. This study further discusses the cases of organizations that have implemented blockchain technology for vaccine passport programs.

Introducing immunity or vaccine passports is one non-pharmaceutical intervention that governments are considering to exempt immune, vaccinated or otherwise risk-free individuals from lockdowns and other public health restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. The primary objective of these documents would be to begin reopening societies, restarting economies and returning to a pre-pandemic normalcy. This article aims to present the start of a conceptual documentary analysis of (proposed and existing) COVID-19 immunity passports in order to more fully center their documentary status within research, considerations and conversations about their potential roles, impacts and implications.

Inspired by Paula A. Treichler's argument for the importance of theoretical thought for untangling the socio-cultural phenomena of epidemics, and drawing upon interdisciplinary theories of documentation, identity and public health, combined with recent news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, this article provides a contemporary overview and conceptual analysis of emerging documentary regimes of COVID-19 immunity verification involving immunity or vaccine passports.

Three major interconnected objectives could be fulfilled by immunity passports. First, they would establish and materialize an official identity of COVID-19 immune for people possessing the formal document. Second, they would serve as material evidence establishing and verifying individuals' immunity, vaccination or risk-free status from the coronavirus that would, in term, determine and regulate their movements and other privileges. Third, they would create tangible links between individuals and governments' official or recognized identity category of COVID-19 immune. Immunity passports would, therefore, help enable and enforce governmental authority and power by situating individuals within documentary regimes of COVID-19 immunity verification.

In the expanding interdisciplinary literature on COVID-19 immunity passports, sometimes also called certificates, licenses, or passes, there appears to be only minimal reference to their documentary instantiations, whether physical, digital, and/or hybrid documents. As yet, there is not any specific documentary approach to or analysis of immunity passports as kinds of documentation. A documentary approach helps to illuminate and emphasize the materiality of and ontological considerations concerning the coronavirus pandemic and its associated kinds of immunity or vaccination.

By beginning an exploration of what makes immunity passports thinkable as a public health response to the coronavirus pandemic, this article illuminates these health and identity documents' material implications for, and effects on, individuals and societies. This article, therefore, helps shed light on what immunity passports reveal about the complicated and contested intersections of identity, documentation, public health and socio-political control and discipline.

This article contributes the start of a documentary analysis of (proposed and existing) COVID-19 immunity passports in order to more fully center their documentary status within research and conversations about them.

This chapter develops a conceptual taxonomy of five emerging digital citizenship regimes: (1) the globalised and generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four intertwined, non-mutually exclusive and non-generalisable new technopoliticalised and city-regionalised digital citizenship regimes in certain European nation-states’ urban areas; (2) algorithmic citizenship, which is driven by blockchain and has allowed the implementation of an e-Residency programme in Tallinn; (3) liquid citizenship, driven by dataism – the deterministic ideology of big data – and contested through claims for digital rights in Barcelona and Amsterdam; (4) metropolitan citizenship, as revindicated in reaction to Brexit and reshuffled through data co-operatives in Cardiff; and (5) stateless citizenship, driven by devolution and reinvigorated through data sovereignty in Barcelona, Glasgow and Bilbao. This chapter challenges the existing interpretation of how these emerging digital citizenship regimes together are ubiquitously rescaling the associated spaces/practices of European nation-states.

This paper aims to fill the major research gap prevalent in the tourism literature on the new form of tourism branching out from the COVID-19. While there are newspaper reports mentioning about the government’s reaction to vaccine tourism, there is no such study or report that tries to understand what the global masses feel about it; thus, a preliminary investigation of the social sentiment and emotion accruing around vaccine tourism on Twitter is carried out.

This exploratory study serves as a preliminary investigation of the social sentiment and emotion accruing around vaccine tourism on Twitter and tries to categorise them into eight basic emotions from Plutchik (1994) “wheel of emotions” as joy, disgust, fear, anger, anticipation, sadness, trust and surprise. The results are presented through data visualisation technique for analysis. The study makes use of R programming languages and the extensive packages offered on RStudio.

A total of 12,258 emotions were captured. It is evident that Vaccine Tourism has got maximum of positive sentiments (28.14%) which is almost double of the negative sentiment (14.05%). It is visible that the highest sentiment is “trust” (12.74%) and is followed by “fear” (8.97%). The least visible sentiment is “surprise” (4.32%). Polarity has been found for maximum tweets as positive (55.52%) which yet again surpasses negative polarity (33.7%), and neutral polarity is the least (10.67%).

It can be said that people bear a positive emotion regarding vaccine tourism such as “trust” and “joy” which also denotes a positive sentiment score for testing polarity. But there are still concerns of high prices of the packages, fear-prevalent people to step out, and the uncertainty of right precautionary measures being taken still puts vaccine tourism under the radar of doubt with a fourth population having negative and neutral sentiments each. This is indicative with “fear” being the second highest emotion to the users. There are mixed emotions for vaccine tourism, but positive dominates the results.

The study attempts to see the global reaction on social media on vaccine tourism trend for giving food for thought to marketers. It can be said that Asians can be the target group.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study that addresses the new trend of “Vaccine Tourism” or attempts to understand the emotions and sentiments of people globally.