Ticketmaster is working on a plan to verify customers’ vaccination status before selling them concert tickets, according to Billboard.
Now that a coronavirus vaccine is in its final stages, Ticketmaster hopes to verify customers’ vaccination status and/or COVID-19 testing results in a pre-purchase application.
The application must be submitted through Ticketmaster’s digital app and verified by third-party health information companies and vaccine distribution partners, such as CVS Minute Clinic and Labcorp.
The system, as it is planned out now, will require concertgoers who purchase a ticket to verify they have been vaccinated or have tested negative for the coronavirus 24 to 72 hours before the event.
Ticket holders would need to ask the lab or pharmacy to deliver the results to health pass companies such as CLEAR or IBM. Then, users must upload their credentials to the app to attend the event.
The problem, however, is that there is currently no third-party company able to provide the required technology that would give real-time vaccination results.
Mark Yovich, president of Ticketmaster, believes it will become available though as vaccines are distributed, and that eventually there will be an entire COVID-19 tech sector that airlines, theme parks and other public spaces will depend upon.
“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,” Yovich said.
Yovich hopes this safety requirement will help “revive” the entertainment industry.
But unfortunately for him, a majority of the American public has already made it clear they do not plan on being forced to take a coronavirus vaccine. And many don’t plan on taking the vaccine at all—even if it becomes widely available.
“I don’t plan on being anyone’s guinea pig,” Ebony Dew, an independent voter from Capitol Heights, Maryland, told USA Today. “I don’t plan on getting it at all.”
