‘Serious failings’ at online vaccination registry, says federal commissioner

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The voluntary site allowed people to register their vaccinations online, but the probe found their data was not secure. Keystone / Gaetan Bally

A federal investigator has found “serious” technical failures at voluntary vaccination registry mesvaccins.ch, which was closed in May following data security concerns.

“The technical failures were indeed very serious, affecting all services of the platform,” Federal Data Protection Commissioner Adrian Lobsiger told Swiss public radio SRFExternal link on Friday.

He opened an investigation in May after a report that 450,000 vaccination data, including those of 240,000 people vaccinated against Covid-19, were openly accessible and vulnerable to manipulation. Lobsiger has now produced a final report.

Users should be able to recuperate their information or delete it, he told SRF. A viable solution has been found and is being discussed, he said, but did not give further details.

Lessons learned

The lesson from this, Lobsiger continued, was that “the Swiss Confederation should feel just as responsible when it works with private companies as when it handles health data itself and must keep a close watch”.

The free service allowed people to create an electronic version of their paper vaccination record to ensure they were kept up to date about their vaccinations. The platform operated in four languages under a mandate from the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH).

FOPH and the Federal Data Protection Commissioner announced earlier this year that they had launched proceedings against the MyVaccines foundation which operated the platform.

About Swissinfo

SWI swissinfo.ch – the international service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Since 1999, swissinfo.ch has fulfilled the federal government’s mandate to distribute information about Switzerland internationally, supplementing the online offerings of the radio and television stations of the SBC. Today, the international service is directed above all at an international audience interested in Switzerland, as well as at Swiss citizens living abroad.

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