This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 8th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown. The feds are mulling

what a vaccine passport would achieve and if they should do it at all. One thing we do know, a massive government database that limits the

movement of otherwise free Americans is a recipe for disaster. So if we value the mutually

beneficial exchanges that such a certification might empower,

we don't want the feds in charge.

What should it look like?

Cato's Julian Sanchez and Jeff Singer comment.

Julian, I want to begin with you here.

People don't want to interact with certain people for certain reasons and the prevalence

of an infectious disease with a high enough infection rate and mortality rate if somebody is infected and certain populations are more susceptible to that sort of thing than others, it seems reasonable

to want to have assurances among private parties that the person I'm dealing with is effectively protected from this virus and to allow ourselves to engage in as normal a way as possible,

although that seems a pretty distant memory right now. What do we need to do in order to have that?

Well, so we already have records that individuals are given when they receive vaccines of

those vaccinations you've probably seen them on Instagram or Facebook or

social media when people get one of the COVID vaccines they They're given a little card with a CDC logo and a

scribble of some information and so these are records people have to show yes I've

been vaccinated but they're not particularly secure.

That is to say, anyone with a laser printer could knock out one of those things on card stock.

So the question is, well, would it be desirable to have a record that was more secure? That was, for example, cryptographically verified so that you had entities, health care providers that had been allocated the vaccine

that would have a cryptographic key they could use to authenticate your name and the details of

when you got the shot so that you had a

card or maybe a file on your smartphone that had a QR code or a barcode that

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