Second Dose Dates Sometimes Earlier Than First... Possible Errors in 5 Million Japanese Vaccine Records

COVID-19 vaccination ticket for Japan sent by mail.
[Photo by Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Seoyoung Kwon] As the Japanese government plans to start issuing electronic certificates for COVID-19 vaccinations from the 20th, controversy has arisen over an analysis suggesting that up to 5 million vaccination records may have been incorrectly registered in the database.

According to Kyodo News on the 10th, the Digital Agency, which oversees electronic administrative tasks in Japan, revealed that out of approximately 100 million individual vaccination records registered in the COVID-19 Vaccination Record System (VRS), about 5 million entries may contain errors. The VRS holds data for 100 million vaccinated individuals, and as of the 3rd, about 5% of the data was found to have content errors requiring correction.

Examples of incorrectly registered information include cases where only the second dose information was entered or where the date of the second dose was recorded earlier than the first dose. There were also instances of errors in vaccine lot numbers and cases where the first and second dose vaccines were the same but recorded differently.

The VRS is designed so that the medical institution staff responsible for vaccinations registers information by scanning an 18-digit unique number printed on the vaccination ticket using a device camera. However, if the device shakes during this process, number recognition errors can occur. Mistakes during manual input of vaccine lot numbers and dates were also identified as another cause.

Earlier, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who took office last October, emphasized that from the 20th, electronic vaccination certificates would be issued via a smartphone app using the VRS to facilitate their use in daily life. The Digital Agency also plans to start issuing electronic certificates according to the scheduled timeline, following the Prime Minister’s directive.

However, Kyodo News reported that as the Digital Agency requests local governments managing vaccination records to correct erroneous information, the workload for each local government is increasing. It also added that if incorrect information is reflected in the electronic certificates, the trust in the Digital Agency?which was launched promoting the realization of e-government?could decline.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.