Sacks predicted that government proposals for digital vaccination passports would "fade away very quickly once Covid is over," i.e., would not persist long after mid‑2021.

In reality, governments expanded and institutionalized digital vaccine credentials well beyond that timeframe:

• The EU Digital COVID Certificate (EU DCC) was formally in force from 1 July 2021 until 30 June 2023, and its regulation was explicitly extended by one year to mid‑2023 rather than allowed to lapse in 2022. It was used across all EU member states, facilitated free movement, and became a global reference standard for travel, with over a billion certificates issued and dozens of non‑EU countries connected. (consilium.europa.eu)
• Instead of being retired when the WHO declared the end of the COVID‑19 global health emergency in May 2023, the EU DCC framework was handed over to the World Health Organization. WHO and the European Commission launched the Global Digital Health Certification Network in June–July 2023, explicitly building on the EU DCC to support ongoing verification of COVID‑19 and other vaccination certificates for future health threats. (who.int)
• In the United States, no single federal passport was issued, but a de facto national standard emerged: SMART Health Cards. By early 2022, at least 21 states plus DC and Puerto Rico offered SMART Health Cards as verifiable digital proof of vaccination, and more than 200 million Americans could obtain such credentials. These were explicitly described by public and private stakeholders as the national standard for digital vaccine verification and used for travel and access to venues. (forbes.com)
• New York’s Excelsior Pass, a prominent state-run digital vaccine passport used for entry to restaurants and entertainment venues, launched in 2021 and was not decommissioned until July 28, 2023—over two years after mid‑2021 and months after the U.S. federal public health emergency ended. (ny1.com)

While most day-to-day access mandates eased by 2022, digital vaccine-passport systems did not quickly disappear once the acute COVID period passed; they were extended, widely adopted, and repurposed into longer-term digital health credential infrastructure. That outcome is opposite to Sacks’s claim that such proposals would fade away very quickly once Covid was over, so the prediction is best judged as wrong.