Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave

I've done some asking around on this. The good news is that Scotland, like England, has a core digital respositary of data for those vaccinated.

England benefited from something known as NIMS - the National Immunisation Management Service - which was originally designed for Winter Flu and was improved during the summer last year (so before vaccines for COVID-19 came along) because it was felt that improving flu vaccine take up would be at least something useful to do. It was a stunning success, in terms of getting those 50 years old jabbed, and following up on older people who were a bit slow on getting jabs. Flu didn't happen in England this year (more as a side effect of social distancing) and that saved thousands of lives. NIMS was built on to allow tracking of 2 jabs of COVID-19 vaccines. I have 2 modes of operation as a vaccinator, paper based and using a PC. On the PC system I can see what flu and previous vaccines patients have had - for example to make sure people do not get the wrong second vaccine. It's very quick, less than a second to get the details up on screen, and less than that if I have the NHS number. I can also see most people did get their flu vaccines. After vaccination the data gets uploaded in the early hours of the next morning. I've made the point before that some of our unspoken heros are the computer geeks doing digitilsation for the NHS and other bodies.

Scotland - well I don't know the full details - but they do have something faiirly similar to NIMS, but developed more recently. Known as the Vaccines Management Tool (VMT). It works on everything from an Android phone upwards and allows health professionals to record and check vaccine data. In the cloud there is a fast access database with full vaccination details held against everyone's CHIN. The only bit that Scotland doesn't appear to have is linking the data back to patients via an App, but that's relatively easy and quick to do.

Let's imagine Portugal wanted confirmation that someone from England or Scotland had been vaccinated as they had claimed. Under both NIMS and VMT it would be technically possible and straightforward for Portugal to send to the UK the date of birth and CHIN or NHS number and get a yea or nay. That's quite similar to how the USA handled ESTAs. GDPR isn't a bar to this either so long as the traveller had given the green light. If name was added then it would be difficult to forge since that would have to match the passport along with the DOB. Without the CHIN or NHS number you would need a unique match. So my name is not so usual, I'm the only person in the UK with my surname born on my date of birth. But usually postcode, surnanme, gender and date of birth is a unique match. It's only really twins living in the same house where you need the first name too.