COVID-19 Vaccine Verifications Via Digital / QR-enabled Certifications. 

What happens after everyone gets the vaccine? MyVaxPass can be the bridge to the new normal with your help.

As the nation and the world continues to deal with the deadly COVID-19 epidemic that has touched all of our lives and celebrates the new vaccines that are just now getting distributed, a question that not many have asked but that is going to need to be answered is “now what?”. Once we have a vaccine distributed, how are we actually going to get back to our “normal” lives? The vaccines’ distribution, an extraordinary logistical problem in and of itself, is itself only part of the solution to getting us to that “new normal.” Other key components are going to be encouraging people to take the vaccine in the first place, and then figuring out a system for verifying people have received the vaccine in order to return to the workplace, attend crowded events, and patronize certain businesses such as airlines or hotels.

So far, as has been the case this entire pandemic, governments of the world seem to be a few steps behind. In the U.S., although each vaccine is supposed to come with a vaccine record card, if businesses or the government themselves make taking the vaccine mandatory, there will be a very large moral hazard to faking these cards, making them untrustworthy on their own. Furthermore, if someone loses a card or it is damaged, how will they prove they have been vaccinated? Finally, the lack of trust permeating our society is not going anywhere, meaning people are going to have to constantly produce a vaccine verification for pretty much anything they want to do. How are we going to get out of this mess? We believe we’ve come up with a solution: MyVaxPass– an app and service designed to infuse trust and verification into what is going to be a universal problem in the coming months.

MyVaxPass will be built on technology and knowhow from key founders of InvestReady, a platform that has been trusted for over 7 years by clients such as Mercedes-Benz Financial Services and tens of thousands of accredited investors. InvestReady verifies sensitive financial information for these high net worth and income clients on behalf of issuers who face dire consequences if they get the verifications wrong in the form of SEC sanctions and fines. InvestReady then provides the investors with a digital certificate they can utilize with other issuers without again having to prove their credentials. In a similar manner, MVP is seeking to verify sensitive medical information, namely vaccination records, to allow employers and businesses to quickly and seamlessly verify their employees and customers are vaccinated, in order to avoid dire consequences, both from a health and potentially government compliance perspective, if they get things wrong. We’ve been doing this for a long time and know how to scale this process up to serve millions of end users using apps and smartphones, as well as web-based and API solutions. 

With this KickStarter project, we hope to launch and app available in the iOS and Android app stores that will be ready by June of 2021 to begin verifying vaccinations. We also plan to provide a free QR-enabled wearable similar to a LiveStrong bracelet either included with the purchase of a verification or as a paid add-on (still figuring out the logistics!) We’re also planning on selling custom wearables that will include a QR that pulls up your latest certification when scanned. Finally, we also plan to allow users that are medically exempt from taking the vaccine to verify their exemption through our enhanced verification process, allowing us to contact their doctor directly for confirmation of their medical exemption, and providing the user with a digital exemption verification as well. 

Aside from in-app purchases from users, our business model will also target large employers that may be willing to subsidize the verification costs for their employees. We’ll also provide businesses that want to verify their customers are vaccinated the opportunity to utilize our app and API at the point of sale for online tickets or in person at the gate, as well as advertise discounts and deals for potential new customers that have already been vaccinated. However, we’re also big proponents of users owning their own data, so one of the ways we are not planning to profit off of is selling your data. Ever. Finally, we’ll be putting together other prizes and perks to incentivize as many people to take the vaccine as possible — a “carrot” to counteract the “stick” that public and private vaccine mandates may be regarded as.

How It Will Work

MyVaxPass will provide the following services:

• KYC-level ID Verifications
• Standard Vaccination Verifications
• Enhanced Vaccination Verifications
• Medical Exemption Verifications
• QR-Enabled Digital Certificates and Wearables for each of the verifications
• Section for Rewards, Discounts, Deals, and Perks for verified users
• API integrations for employer HR software as well as electronic health records

KYC-level ID Verifications

The first step to our service will be to verify the ID of the user. We will utilize the same techniques that banks and other financial firms are required to utilize under KYC (know your customer) laws and regulations. We’ll verify their phone numbers, their IDs such as driver’s licenses, and have the user take a selfie that we’ll utilize for the ID verification as well as for the digital certificates that we will provide if approved. 

Standard Vaccination Verifications

Utilizing OCR and AI tech, our standard verifications will allow users whose IDs have already been verified to scan their official CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card, and do the following:

• Match the name on the card to the user’s ID
• Match the product name and lot number of the vaccine provided to a database of known products and lot numbers (we’ll make sure they are real products and numbers)
• Verify that the Patient ID number is legitimate (either match the ID on a known database or make sure the numbering scheme matches the known method for those ID numbers)
• Verify that the vaccine provider is real

As we get more and more certificates submitted through the service, it will work faster and more efficiently due to the nature of the deep learning AI platforms we plan to utilize. 

Enhanced Vaccination Verifications

Our enhanced verifications will take the verifications a step further by not just utilizing the card provided by the user, but also getting confirmation of the vaccine administration directly from the vaccine provider. In order to do so, the app will do the following:

• Provide the user with a pre-filled HIPAA-compliant form to sign that releases the provider to send MyVaxPass the specific information about the vaccine we are attempting to verify. We’ll already have the provider’s information from the COVID vaccination card, but will also allow the user to adjust the contact information as needed. 
• We’ll then send that HIPAA-compliant form to the provider by email, fax, or mail if needed and will have processes in place to receive the confirmation via email, fax, mail, phone, text, telegram, smoke signals, whatever it takes! 

Enhanced verifications will be the most fraud resistant and legitimate verifications possible, and will likely be utilized by employers that demand that level of compliance for safety and liability purposes, as well as for those users that want to give as much assurance to the businesses they patronize that they have indeed taken the vaccine. 

Medical Exemption Verifications

Although our app is aimed specifically to verify when someone has taken the vaccine, we’re very aware that many people, due to various medical conditions, will likely have recommendations from their doctors that they skip the vaccine. We don’t want to leave them behind so utilizing the same process as our Enhanced verification, we’ll contact their doctor on their behalf and provide a certification of medical exemption once the doctor gets back to us and confirms exemption. Note that this will only be available for medical exemptions and only be provided through our Enhanced process to minimize any bad actors from utilizing our system as an end-around to skipping the vaccine for non-medical purposes. 

QR-Enabled Digital Certificates and Wearables for each of the verifications

Once a user has their vaccine verification completed, they’ll be notified that a new digital certificate has been created in the app. We’ll also allow the user to download the certificate into their Apple or Google wallets, as well as provide the user with a wearable with a special QR code embedded that takes the scanner of the QR code to the latest certificate provided for the user. The person scanning the QR certificate doesn’t need an account with us to utilize the product, they’ll just be taken to a web page that shows the user’s picture, their name, as well as the vaccine status. We will also provide the option for businesses that want to to sign up with us to choose their own image to display when their account scans a QR to further enhance the legitimacy of the verification (that way someone can’t make a fake MyVaxPass page and pawn it off as a real verification since they won’t be able to guess the business account’s image). 

Section for Rewards, Discounts, Deals, and Perks for verified users

We know that vaccine mandates alone will not encourage, and in fact may discourage, universal vaccine adoption. We want to help by providing the “carrot” equivalent to the mandates’ “stick” by giving rewards and incentives for users that get verified. We plan to do this by providing a section of the app solely dedicated to currently verified users that allows them to:

• Participate in sweepstakes such as the ones provided by Omaze, so you might end up meeting Lebron or winning a Lambourgini if you verify with us
• Get discounts and deals at local businesses nearby that partner with us to provide these exclusive deals for MVP verified users, which also ends up helping these local businesses get back some customers after this horrific year. 
• Receive employer-based incentives from our participating employer partners which we’ll encourage to provide their employees with rewards such as bonuses or extra paid time off for those that complete a verification through their MyVaxPass integration. 

API integrations for employer HR software as well as electronic health records

We want to make adoption of our service as simple as possible for businesses, employers, and vaccine providers, so we’ll be providing as many ways for them to utilize our service as technologically feasible. Our API will plug into their existing services, such as Workday or Salesforce, and we have a lot of technical expertise on our team already that has worked with electronic medical records as well. 

We already know how to build this, we just need the funds 

We have an amazing team of founders and advisors that already know how to build and sell this service. 

None of the tech described above is new and we have the experience and knowhow to build it all, right now. We just need funding to actually make it scalable and secure. We’re going through KickStarter first just for the sake of speed since we literally just came up with the idea a few weeks ago and don’t want to wait for the average 6 month process to raise funds through “traditional” means. That’s not to say that we won’t be going through that process, but we believe that time is of the essence with this service and that hopefully enough people like you see the benefits of having something like this exist enough to donate. If you’re still with us at this point, that you so much for your time, and if you think this is a great idea, please donate so we can make this happen! Hopefully we can all rekindle the spirit we briefly saw at the beginning of this ordeal that we’re all in this together and that we can work together to get our lives to our new normal quickly and safely!