

It did not respond to my request for comment, and little is known about how the cards came to be. The logical step here is to ask the CDC what the deal is, but the agency, which issues the cards, isn’t saying much about them. It’s not the highest-stakes question of this stage of the pandemic, but it’s one that’s become quite common: How did we end up with these cards?
COVID 19 MULTIPASS VERIFICATION
Now, as Delta-variant cases surge and more municipalities and private businesses begin to require proof of vaccination to patronize places such as restaurants and gyms, the rubber has met the road on this flimsy de facto verification apparatus. Its strangeness had been a bit less important in the past seven months, when evidence of immunity was rarely necessary to do things within America.

COVID 19 MULTIPASS SERIES
The card is dumb, and it’s difficult to imagine a series of intentional decisions that could have reasonably led to it as the consensus best pick. With all due respect to our country’s overworked and undersupported public-health apparatus: This is dumb. Read: No one actually knows if you’re vaccinated Could it unlock some sort of privileges at the airport? Were restaurants going to check it? Did I need to take it to medical appointments? My card had gotten shuffled into a sandwich baggie filled with extra masks, not to be rediscovered for six weeks. Despite dutifully sliding the card into its new protective pocket after lunch with my friend, I eventually found myself tearing my apartment apart searching for it, for exactly the reasons I had feared: It was the wrong size for the one place where most people keep all their important everyday documents, and of too nebulous a purpose to sit safely in a drawer with my birth certificate and passport. Indeed, I lost it-at least for a little while. I’m going to either lose this or destroy it, I thought to myself. I contemplated where I should put this brand-new golden ticket, ultimately sliding the thin piece of too-large card stock into an envelope I found in my tote. When I got my first shot, in late February, I sat in the mandatory waiting area, holding my new card in one hand and my wallet in the other, trying to understand why the two objects weren’t compatible. “It’s for your vaccine card,” she explained. My friend had swiped a handful from her office’s supply closet.

From her bag came a rectangle of clear, thick, double-layered plastic-the kind of display pocket that often dangles at the end of a lanyard. As soon as we sat down, she began rifling through her purse. This spring, as New York City warmed up and the local vaccination rate surged, I met my best friend for our first restaurant meal together in months.
