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Comment by imrehg | Hacker News Reader

The inoculation certificate validity is currently 180 days since the last jab (looking at the slide deck in the repo). That seems super short. Will people really need 2 courses of jabs each year (that is 4 jabs with most current vaccines)?

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No. The federal council has stated in multiple press conferences that the 6 month period is solely because we only have good data about vaccine protection for this time period. Studies are still ongoing and if it turns out the vaccine protects people well after this period, it will be adjusted. The 6 monthsbare just preliminary.

Pardon my French, but that's a completely ass-backwards approach from the council. If we later find that the vaccines need boosters, so be it, maybe that's justification for an additional restriction. There's an argument against this (of the "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" variety[1]), but what's proposed is taking a mile and promising to maybe sometime walk some of it back at some point. How far? In response to whose data? The ongoing debate around the "lab leak" hypothesis should have you asking questions about how information is collected and decisions made, _particularly_ at the science/public policy boundary.

[1]: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/covid-4-9-another-va... - Scroll down to/Ctrl-F for: "Or, you could raise the more generalized version of this objection. Also from the comments:"

In Swiss culture, dependability is valued a lot. People prefer to know for sure that they are guaranteed to be exempt from quarantine restrictions for at least six months (which may be extended indefinitely down the road), over the alternative of assuring indefinite immunity right away and then curtailing that in case the vaccines do not offer long-term protection.

It gives people a certain peace of mind and allows them to make travel plans with confidence.

New York's was 90 days, then 180, then a year. They've been extending it as the data from the early clinical trial cohorts age.

The New York one is different in that it’s just an assertion of good/not good based on NY’s standards.

The EU model is a little different as there is a whole laundry list of data.

Nobody knows for sure at this point but the prospects for long-term vaccine-derived immunity look really good so probably not.

They pretty much have to keep this short. Anything more permanent and you open up the risk of "alternative" databases being build by nefarious third parties.

How does a short lifetime of the certs help with 3rd parties building these databases you mention?

Once the certificate becomes obsolete, it becomes useless and therefore needs to be reacquired. Same process with American SSNs, if they were depreciated very 6 months getting yours published wouldn’t be an issue.

But one of these passes is nearly worthless (in the sense of impersonation) if you don't also have a valid ID of the person it got issued to and you look the same.

When my vaccination pass would "leak" then my name & birthdate would be leaked and they would know someone of that name and birthdate got vaccinated but other than that, they can't impersonate me as if they presented the pass they would be asked to show the corresponding ID as well.

The danger is not the pass itself. It's that you'd be prompted to display it systematically for any and all activities.

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