You’ve got a digital vaccination certificate. What’s next?

A woman is innoculated with a COVID-19 vaccine. Picture: AFP

The newly minted ability to store your digital Covid vaccination certificate in your phone throws up the question of just how will it be used?

Having a certificate loaded into your iPhone Apple Wallet or Android phone Google Pay app suggests that soon, someone, somewhere will ask you to produce it. That’s only a matter of time.

It makes sense if you are visiting an aged care facility, disability care centre or general hospital to show it when asked. I will gladly do that if it puts people at ease.

There are caveats: while Pfizer and AstraZeneca are about 99 per cent certain to save your life, neither provides a guarantee that you won’t transmit COVID-19, although there seems agreement among epidemiologists that you are likely to transmit less of the virus if you do.

The other caveat is that we don’t know how long this protection lasts, but we are likely to need more jabs over time, and updates to our Covid certificate status will need to reflect their currency.

In the meantime, we’ll probably be asked to show our vaccination certificates when entering some buildings and offices, and your employer may want to see it if your company has a policy of mandatory staff vaccinations.

That raises the issue of security of the vaccination certificates. Without QR codes, a photo or a means of checking against a government database for authenticity, the certificates could be easy to forge or share if they are used seriously for vetting entry to locations.

There may be contention should some restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs, theatres and venues decide to admit only people who show they are vaccinated. That could be for health reasons, to encourage people to get the jab, or commercial reasons – a restaurant might brand itself as for vaccinated people only, just as it might label itself as vegetarian or vegan.

Some see vaccination certificates or passports as helping Australia open up and offering less restrictions to people who can easily show they are vaccinated.

That the government gives you an easy way to demonstrate you are fully vaccinated should prompt discussions on these issues.

A digital vaccination certificate on Apple watch.

For one, I hope that digital vaccination certificates are used positively – as an incentive to get vaccinated and a reward when you do, rather than just a tool for banning or excluding the unvaccinated.

While the pace of vaccination is thankfully picking up, there’s an opportunity to offer more incentives through them.

On Monday, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese suggested a $300 cash payment incentive for people to be vaccinated.

This gesture seems to have received a mixed reception. While it is good to have any incentive, some said the best way to encourage vaccination is to tell people to do it to protect themselves and those they love.

A different way would be to adapt the capabilities of Apple Wallet and Google Pay at point-of-sale terminals and offer retail discounts and incentives.

The same technology that’s used to read a loyalty card when you swipe a digitised Woolies, Coles or Kmart rewards card at a point-of-sale terminal could be used to give you a discount, extra points or a gift when you swipe a digital Covid vaccination certificate stored in your phone.

Alternatively, you could have a system where, if you pair your Covid digital certificate with your Qantas card, you get extra frequent flyer points

These rewards would amount to ongoing appreciation for taking a jab, and an incentive to do it again when a booster is needed.

We certainly wouldn’t be the first to do this. A bank has offered higher interest, and a manufacturer is offering longer warranties on products, and an airline is offering up to a 10 per cent discount on airline tickets in India, where the Covid Delta strain began.

India historically was where one of the most contentious health rewards programs took place.

In the early 1970s, some 220,000 men in Gujarat state had vasectomies as part of a mass sterilisation program that took just eight weeks – less than the current NSW lockdown is taking. They were given transistor radios, sewing machines, watches, fans and sofas for their trouble.

There is something disturbingly wrong with convincing men to forgo their reproductive role just for a portable radio.

Nevertheless, a small thank you in the form of retail incentives might help galvanise the community in the quest to reach the 70 and 80 per cent vaccination targets being promoted by the federal government – and to keep things that way.