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EU and WHO Aim for Ever Higher Digital Health Security Globally

Health - June 13, 2023

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In the Coming Days, the European Union’s Digital Certification System Relating to Covid will Come into Force

The WHO, together with the European Union, have announced a historic collaboration for the whole of world health and the first building block will be represented by the adoption, by the World Health Organization, of the Digital Covid certification system studied by the Commission European Union to facilitate the mobility of individuals globally and protect the population of the whole world from all health threats of the present and the future. Complementing the global certification network, a number of digital products will also be developed to ensure better health around the world.

As early as 2 December 2022, the European Commissioner Stella Kyriakides and the WHO director general Tedros Adhanom signed an agreement on strategic cooperation relating to global health dynamics and the new initiative on digital health security was born precisely on the basis of the signature of the collaboration. The designed system will be multilateral, based on WHO indications and consolidated by the Community force of the European Union which will employ all the technical expertise gained in the sector, to guarantee the effective functioning of all the current digital europena certificates.

The guideline for the new project will be represented by the Covid digital certificate and its interoperability which has already guaranteed the bureaucratic simplification of free movement within European borders. The Digital Certificate developed by the European Commission has proved to be extremely useful and practical, so much so that it has been adopted by several other countries in the world struggling with the vicissitudes of the pandemic in recent months and in anticipation of any other health crises in the future.

The World Health Organization, has been committed from the first weeks of the Covid 19 pandemic, to developing effective methods that could help citizens in travel and in normal daily activities despite the growing concern due to the worsening of the infection in the past few years . Technology has been instrumental, alongside healthcare principles, in developing world-class healthcare preparedness critical to addressing increasingly real health threats in the ongoing pandemic era. The collaboration between the European Union and WHO will serve to make the use and integration of the digital certificate created during the months of the Coronavirus pandemic and called Green Pass even easier, through which all European citizens were able to travel with a relative freedom with the possibility of living a daily life otherwise made impossible by the threat of contagion.

The new system shared between the two organizations will make the Green Pass even more complete and usable, as well as for travel, also as a useful tool in the prevention of any diseases or other possible pandemics, considered extremely probable, by insiders, for the next years. The new usefulness of the European digital certificate, which will be used by the WHO globally as a health aid and prevention tool, will require the definition of new security standards and the validation of digital signatures, essential in the prevention of computer fraud which, precisely in months of full use, during the Covid19 pandemic, have repeatedly afflicted the certification system, creating inconvenience for the entire population.

The approach to the new technology by the WHO will take place gradually to integrate, possibly, new functions or technologies that can, for example, simplify the digitization of the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis currently in use by governments. The European Community and the WHO also guarantee absolute transparency, inclusion and responsibility in the management of sensitive data, guaranteeing total respect for privacy and safeguarding national security.

 

Alessandro Fiorentino

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