In the 2011 movie Contagion, wristbands were used to identify vaccinated people during a pandemic. Ticketmaster's plan is a little more complicated, but with Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine candidate showing promising results, the company hopes it will get fans back to concerts and sporting events at some point next year. Ticketmaster says it is developing a plan to check concertgoers' vaccination status using its ticketing app, health information companies like CLEAR Health Pass and IBM's Digital Health Pass, and testing and vaccine providers, Billboard reports. After buying a ticket, fans would need to prove they had either been vaccinated or had tested negative for the coronavirus 24 to 72 hours before the event. They would direct the lab to pass their status to the health pass company, which would alert Ticketmaster, which would enable the credentials needed to get into the event.
Ticketmaster says that it won't store fans' health information, but will use the health pass companies to verify their status on an event-by-event basis. Ticketmaster president Mark Yovich predicts new companies will spring up to deal with the demand for digital screening. "We're already seeing many third-party health care providers prepare to handle the vetting—whether that is getting a vaccine, taking a test, or other methods of review and approval—which could then be linked via a digital ticket so everyone entering the event is verified," he tells Billboard. "Ticketmaster’s goal is to provide enough flexibility and options that venues and fans have multiple paths to return to events." A Ticketmaster spokesperson tells the NME that the technology will be something event organizers can choose to implement, "not something that would be imposed by Ticketmaster." (More Ticketmaster stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
