“It’s important that Sweden continues to participate in the WHO global network for digital health certificates. The agency therefore recommends that the service should continue to be kept on standby in order to enable a faster start-up of the service in the event of a new pandemic”, says the Swedish eHealth Agency.
The EU’s covid digital certificate was introduced by an EU regulation during the coronavirus pandemic and was to be presented when citizens wanted to travel abroad or attend public meetings. The system quickly came under heavy criticism for being invasive, totalitarian and paving the way for a medical apartheid society.
The covidbevis.se service was shut down on June 30, 2023, by which time it had issued about 18 million covid certificates to about 6 million Swedes, according to Läkartidningen.
After that, the service was put on standby for another six months, until December 20, 2023. Now, the Swedish eHealth Agency wants the service to be prepared for a quick and easy restart in order to, if “necessary”, reintroduce covid certificates.
“WHO’s global network”
“The Swedish eHealth Agency considers it important that Sweden continues to participate in the WHO’s global network for digital health certificates. The agency therefore recommends that the service should continue to be kept on standby in order to be able to launch the service more quickly in the event of a new pandemic. The need for preparedness should be assessed on an ongoing basis”, it said.
“The agency estimates that an allocation of SEK 1 million would cover the first year’s costs of preparedness. A common registry with reliable and high quality vaccination data is a prerequisite for a digital vaccination card, it continues.
The agency acknowledges that inaccuracies have been found in some covid certificates – but says these are due to “missing or incorrectly reported doses in the national immunization registry”.
“Therefore, the agency welcomes the committee’s directive on the further development of the National Vaccination Register”, it states.
