With This Vaccine Passport, Which Receipt Do I Goddamn Need?

Last Updated on: 25th September 2021, 09:57 am

So I am a confused human. Somebody straighten me out. As of Wednesday, we have a Vaccine Passport system in Ontario. I was under the impression that for the first month, we only had to show our vaccine receipt that we got from the clinic and our health card. But there’s a chance that that’s not the case. I have heard rumblings that you have to go and download it from the provincial vaccine service, and that version has some kind of watermark that people are looking for. I’m not sure if your actual vaccine receipt from the clinic is also accepted, but since there are so many differing policies about what people will and won’t accept, I figured it was safest to get the one the news is linking to.

The process of downloading it was pretty simple, but I learned a couple of things that I thought might be helpful to know.

1. You have to know your health card number, version code, and a code on the back of the card. I didn’t even know about the code on the back, so it’s a good thing I had Aira to read it to me since I had everything else memorized, but not that.
2. Thankfully, the field where you write your date of birth is just a straight field, so it’s accessible.
3. This document does, in fact, look different than the one I had been emailed on the day of vaccination, so if anybody wanted to quibble about accepting a document, I imagine this one would win.
4. Also, while you view this document on the web, it’s perfectly readable, but I haven’t been able to read the one I downloaded. I don’t know if it’s because of the authenticity stuff they put on it, or what but I can’t read it. I could read the one they sent to me on the day of vaccination, even though Adobe whinged about it being untagged. But with this new one, I can’t even ask Windows to do OCR on it. So when you download it, label the file well.

Hopefully they don’t louse up the QR code stuff next month too badly. And hopefully this might save me and others some pain.