The Vietnamese Health Ministry has started issuing vaccine passports from today, 15th April, the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam's vaccine passport follows the standards of World Health Organisation (WHO) and the European Union (EU), which are followed by 62 nations.

The passport will be available on PC Covid-19 or Digital Health apps. If people don't have the apps, they can get their passports by accessing the health ministry's portal and filling in the necessary information. They will then receive the passports by email.

The passport template was revealed by the Health Ministry in December last year, which has 11 fields of information such as name, date of birth, nationality, targeted disease, doses of vaccines received, date of vaccination, lot number of the vaccine batch, type of vaccine, vaccine product received, the vaccine manufacturer, and a code for the certification.

The name and date of birth will be integrated with other personal identification documents (passports or citizen identification cards).

The information is encoded into a QR code, which will expire after 12 months. Following their expiry, people will be notified, and a new QR code will be created instead.

So far, Vietnam has reached mutual recognition of vaccine passport with 19 countries, namely Japan, the US, the UK, Australia, India, Belarus, Cambodia, the Philippines, Palestine, Maldives, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Turkey, Singapore, Saint Lucia, the Republic of Korea, Iran and Malaysia.

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