Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Dr Ronald Georges said the database will be ready by next week. This database will be internationally recognised to meet the strict proof-of-vaccination requirements of other countries.

Vaccination cards like those issued in the BVI have been found to be inadequate for the international community since unscrupulous persons can easily create counterfeit copies of them. The BVI’s official vaccination database would mitigate against this issue.

“We’ve been working very, very closely with the Department of IT (Information & Technology) … and they have created an application — this will be web-based — where persons can go in there, put in their information, and then on the back end, we would verify. Once it’s been verified, they will automatically get their vaccine verification letter emailed to them,” Dr Georges explained.

He said a unique QR code will be automatically generated on each letter.

“So anybody who gets that letter can either scan the QR code or if they’ve uploaded the PDF, they can just click on the link and they can go straight back to the government’s website and verify that this person is indeed vaccinated,” the CMO further explained.

He continued: “That QR code can easily then be — [and] you can do this yourself or we can talk to the Department of IT to have an application on the website to do it — where you can then create a [digital] vaccine card which you can then put into your phone’s wallet. We haven’t gotten to that stage yet. What we’re ready to roll out at the beginning of next week is to launch the website.”

Meanwhile, the information that persons will be required to upload to get their QR-coded verification letter includes front and back copies of the physical vaccine cards they were given when they got vaccinated, a form of ID, among other things.