Toubiana Raphaëlle, Macdonald Millie, Rajananda Sivananda, Lokvenec Tale, Kingsley Thomas C, Romero-Brufau Santiago
Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA, United States.
University of Queenland, Saint Lucia, QLD, Australia.
Front Big Data. 2022 Jul 8;5:833196. doi: 10.3389/fdata.2022.833196. eCollection 2022.
Electronic vaccine certificates (EVC) for COVID-19 vaccination are likely to become widespread. Blockchain (BC) is an electronic immutable distributed ledger and is one of the more common proposed EVC platform options. However, the principles of blockchain are not widely understood by public health and medical professionals. We attempt to describe, in an accessible style, how BC works and the potential benefits and drawbacks in its use for EVCs. Our assessment is BC technology is not well suited to be used for EVCs. Overall, blockchain technology is based on two key principles: the use of cryptography, and a distributed immutable ledger in the format of blockchains. While the use of cryptography can provide ease of sharing vaccination records while maintaining privacy, EVCs require some amount of contribution from a centralized authority to confirm vaccine status; this is partly because these authorities are responsible for the distribution and often the administration of the vaccine. Having the data distributed makes the role of a centralized authority less effective. We concluded there are alternative ways to use cryptography outside of a BC that allow a centralized authority to better participate, which seems necessary for an EVC platform to be of practical use.
新冠疫苗接种的电子疫苗证书（EVC）可能会广泛普及。区块链（BC）是一种电子不可变分布式账本，是较为常见的提议用于EVC的平台选项之一。然而，公共卫生和医学专业人员对区块链的原理了解并不广泛。我们试图以通俗易懂的方式描述区块链的工作原理，以及其用于EVC的潜在利弊。我们的评估是区块链技术不太适合用于EVC。总体而言，区块链技术基于两个关键原则：使用加密技术，以及以区块链形式存在的分布式不可变账本。虽然使用加密技术可以在保持隐私的同时便于共享接种记录，但EVC需要中央机构提供一定的协助来确认疫苗接种状态；部分原因是这些机构负责疫苗的分发，并且往往还负责疫苗的管理。数据分布式存储使得中央机构的作用效果降低。我们得出结论，在区块链之外还有其他使用加密技术的方法，能够让中央机构更好地参与其中，而这似乎是一个实用的EVC平台所必需的。
