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Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

I have my Covid shots entered into the WHO yellow vaccination passport and assume that's good enough for the time being until a specific "QR code passport" is released.

edited to add: Why should a civilized country just revoke certification once you're fully vaccinated?

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>Why should a civilized country just revoke certification once you're fully vaccinated?

My assumption was that the revocation facility was there to support the standard PKI revocation use cases.

For instance: subsequent discovery of errors in the database that resulted in issuance of the certificate (we discovered you didn't actually get your second shot), loss of control of a signing key, etc.

Not to get get too conspiratorial, but it looks like the Sinovac vaccine is less effective. As new variants come out, the requirement may not be a Covid vaccine, but a specific Covid vaccine. And that data might come out after you already have your shot so requirements for entry could change real time.

Same here. I have had to present my Yellow Card before to enter countries, and I will do the same for COVID immunizations.

When the new apps and digital certificates were announced, being able to revoke certification at any time was touted as one of their major advantages over traditional vaccine certificates. This way, if a new variant arises that preexisting vaccines don’t protect against, or if a state wants to enforce annual booster shots, they can just invalidate older certificates by updating the database entry to which the QR code points.

At least here around I never read that argument. Given that it's initially valid for only 6 month I don't think that's really an issue.

Neither new variants and boosters are reasons for revokation as both are better served by information about the vaccine administered and a timestamp.

if there is a new vaccine required or some follow up procedure or whatever it would make more sense to hand out a new certificate that validates this fact instead of revoking the old one that is actually still perfectly able to validate your previous actions. In fact it might be very beneficial to keep them around to give approval to another step like lets say you will only get that booster shot after you are able to present validation of your vaccination or similar... invalidating these certificates by giving them a date until they are valid is very easy without explicitly revoking certificates.

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