Vaccine pass rollout far from perfect

‘If you want summer, get vaccinated’’ has been the Government’s message to Kiwis for several weeks. Failing to do so will mean ‘‘there will be everyday things you will miss out on’’. That was the plan anyway. And it was a solid plan.

The implementation of that plan – using technology – has been less impressive.

The company responsible for developing the new My Vaccine Pass system, Mattr, seems to have done a reasonable job given the quick turnaround required. Why there was such a short turnaround is a question that needs asking (Covid isn’t a surprise).

There are several dates given for when work began on this project. Claire Barber, Mattr’s chief executive, told media that the company found out it had won the contract at the beginning of August. National’s Covid-19 spokesman, Chris Bishop, said the Government only signed the contract on October 13.

Neither date suggests the Government hasn’t needlessly rushed.

Anyone who has tried to launch a new website, or app, anything tech-related, will know how long even the simplest of jobs can take. Add in the bureaucracy of the Government, and it’s a miracle that My Vaccine Pass is out in the wild already.

But the rollout of My Vaccine Pass has been far from perfect.

The signup page for the My Vaccine Pass launched on the morning of November 17. It crashed minutes later.

The reason? Too many people, with the threat of ‘‘missing out’’ ringing in their ears, tried to use the site, and like lots of poorly-configured sites, it fell over. Why? Because it had too many visitors.

Fast forward to this week, and we now know more specifics as to why the site wasn’t able to handle the spike in traffic.

Speaking about the crash on Wednesday, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said: ‘‘In the earlier days of that system, there were some issues with the gateway to allow people into the system.

‘‘That was designed because we didn’t want that system to be the subject of a denial of service attack.

‘‘Unfortunately, a denial of service attack and several million Kiwis trying to access the system at the same time – to the system software – looks much the same, and so it was turning down the volume arbitrarily, and they’ve managed to ease that.

‘‘So there should be fewer issues with people downloading their passes and accessing that system now.’’

There are a couple of things to loop back on here. Running software designed to identify a spike in users as an attack is embarrassing. This site was always going to be popular on day one. It was, after all, Kiwis’ only ticket to summer.

The next bit, about how ‘‘there should be fewer issues with people downloading their passes and accessing that system now’’, is more worrying.

I spend a large portion of my life fiddling with laptops, smartphones and websites and I even struggled to work out what I was supposed to do. Saving an email attachment into a smartphone’s wallet isn’t an intuitive task. I’d wager that most Kiwis have never used their phone’s wallet ever before and probably didn’t even know they had one.

This prompted me to publish an article How to download My Vaccine Pass on your phone, on my website. And (so far) it’s the second most popular article my site has ever had.

Thirdly, and you couldn’t make this up, the My Vaccine Pass record was sent out as an editable PDF. Meaning anyone can edit the name and date of birth on the pass, with the most basic of software, in a matter of seconds.

On Wednesday, Hipkins proudly announced, ‘‘about 2 million people who have created their My Covid Record. About 1.75 million people have downloaded their QR code’’.

That’s great. But it also means the error, much like the virus itself, is now very much in the community.

It didn’t have to be like this.

If, for example, the Government chose an app-based vaccine passport instead of a PDF and wallet-based vaccine passport, the problem could be fixed by pushing out a quick app update. The problem with the technology it has chosen is that the horse has already bolted. Two million of them so far.

The plan to combat non-vaccinated people using doctored My Covid Passes to ‘‘not miss out on summer’’ doesn’t involve technology at all. Instead, the onus is put on businesses to ask any customers – who they suspect have committed fraud – to provide additional identification.

These are the same businesses that have been starved of customers and revenue for the past four months. It ain’t going to happen.

It’s maddening. We’ve known vaccines were the ticket to getting life (not just a single summer) back to normal for a long time now. During that time, the Government has rightly spent billions of dollars on wage subsidies and other support payments.

What it didn’t spend enough money on was research, planning and investment in how technology could be used to help manage our soon-to-be vaccinated future.

Instead, it waited until August to engage the services of Mattr, and the rushed vaccine passport we’re all left with isn’t fit for purpose.