Replacing COVID vaccine booklet to be expedited after digitisation – Health Minister

Challenges associated with replacing COVID-19 vaccine cards will soon be remedied with a faster process, after the digitalisation of records.
Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony shared this position on Friday during the COVID briefing. Presently, if a person loses their vaccination card, they would have to visit the Health Ministry, where a manual search is conducted to recover the data.
He pointed out that this can be cumbersome, since some individuals cannot recall details on the card that would make this process easier.
“We have a special department that would deal with replacing vaccination cards. Our current challenge is that sometimes when people lose their card, they don’t know when they got their vaccine, they don’t have a date. That can become very challenging because going back over our records, in many cases, we have to look at it manually.”

He added, “It can be challenging, especially if they don’t know the exact date they got vaccinated. Some people can’t even remember which vaccination centre they went to. It poses a challenge for us and we have to put a lot of staff to go and do those searches. It can take a lot of valuable time.”
For now, the Minister is advising persons to safeguard their vaccine card – which has been an essential tool in accessing services and public buildings.
“I just want to advise people that let them keep their vaccination card safe but everybody has a smartphone. Maybe they can take images of the card just in case it gets misplaced, they would have all the details of the card in case they need a replacement.”
It was clarified that there are existing cases where persons have lost their cards and requested a replacement. However, it cannot be done instantaneously.
“I’m not sure if we have a backlog. There might be a few cases that we do have but these are some of the difficulties that we have. People would turn up and expect that we’ll be able to instantaneously give them a card. It doesn’t work that way. We have to go, check the records, verify and then be able to issue the card…We’re in the process of digitalising the records and once that is completed, that will be a much faster process,” said the Minister.
Just this week, it was announced that the specialised equipment to print new cards will arrive within the first quarter of 2022. This undertaking is in conjunction with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). A special team is still working to enter the current data into a digital format and once the equipment arrives, new cards will be minted. (G12)