Vietnam Officially Introduces COVID-19 Vaccine Passport

Vietnam's Health Ministry announced, on Wednesday, procedures for issuing official COVID-19 'vaccine passports’ along with the passport templates effective.

The COVID-19 vaccine certificates shall be issued for people who have received the primary course of one of eight types of COVID-19 vaccines licensed for use in Vietnam by the health ministry, 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 vaccine passports have 11 sections of information; name, date of birth, nationality, the 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. The QR code-based passport is going to be valid for only 12 months.

In November, four people died in Vietnam after taking the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine (Vero Cell), after suffering an adverse allergic reaction, according to health officials.

The four people who lost their lives all worked at a shoe company in central Thanh Hóa Province, according to reports. The cause of death in all cases has been identified as anaphylaxis – a severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reaction.

The workers were inoculated with the Sinopharm vaccine on Tuesday. Two of them died on Wednesday morning, one died later the same day, and the four one was confirmed on Friday.