CLEAR’s Health Pass: Merging Biometrics and COVID Health Info

CLEAR is a New York City-based company that originally offers biometric security. This time around, CLEAR developed a product that can help speed up the process of checking COVID19 info. The company recently came up with Health Pass, a tool that merges biometric identifiers to a person’s COVID19 health information. This can potentially come in handy in airports and large crowd events.

Health Pass

Health Pass will link your face, eyes, and fingerprints to your health records making it easier to verify a person’s COVID19 status. This becomes practical for sporting events. In February, 100 vaccinated healthcare workers used Health Pass to attend the Super Bowl. Some NBA teams are also using the app to check for their fans’ COVID status. The same goes for those attending NHL games in Arizona.

According to CLEAR’s co-founder and CEO Caryn Seidman-Becker, the company realized that everyone will eventually need to show proof of vaccination. She added that “connecting you to your health insights that are COVID-related was just always part of our mission”.

Now that more people are getting vaccinated, re-opening large gatherings is top priority. However, it gets tricky without the aid of technology. To make it easier to check, it seems that a digital solution is inevitable.

Not a Vaccine Passport?

So far, most establishments rely on their customers’ honesty when it comes to their vaccine status. However, there are some retailers that used the Health Pass. Walmart is one of those businesses that partnered with CLEAR to know their customers’ COVID status.

The company clarified that it is not a vaccine passport. CLEAR’s CEO said that “What we are talking about is giving people control and access to their health-care information, which was something that was happening before”.

There is also some resistance when it comes to normalizing vaccine passports. Florida even came up with a law that would prevent businesses from using a vaccine passport on both employees and customers.