CDC email shows vaccination cards should fit in your wallet

Since the beginning of time (about five or six months ago) people all over the world (Twitter user in The United States) puzzling over a very important question: why does the COVID-19 vaccination card not fit in a wallet?

The card is too big for a regular card slot and like Amanda Mull in. stressed The Atlantic, still small enough to be easily lost. It’s like a goldilocks upside down: just wrong. A handful of people speculated to Mull in August that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may not have thought so much about the size of the cards.

But it turned out that at least they were Think about the size of the card, according to emails received through a Freedom of Information Act request and sent to The edge from a reader.

Email correspondence within the CDC shows that the agency was working on a vaccination card in early August 2020, months before the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved for use. On August 6, an employee sent an email with a vaccination card attached. “Remember that the card must be small enough to fit in a wallet,” the employee wrote in an email. “Most of the cards I see are about four by four inches and are usually folded.”

It’s important to note here that wallet-sized things are much smaller than 4 “x 3.5”. Wallet-sized photos are 2.5 “by 3.5” and standard credit cards are 2.125 “by 3.37”.

But the crucial info comes at the end of the sentence: “normally folded”. If the cards were 4 inches wide and 3.5 inches high, folding them in half would make them 2 inches wide and 3.5 inches high. That’s pretty close to the size of a standard credit card.

And that wasn’t even the final dimensions of the cards. The following Saturday, Operation Warp Speed, which led the vaccine development process, asked the CDC to send the vaccine card by the end of the day on Monday. The CDC team went into full swing to get the design ready on time, and the same employee sent a print-ready version Tuesday morning. In that email, the dimensions of the card were set to 4.25 “by 3.5”.

Okay, time for some more math. wrinkles the Size card in half would make the card 2.125 inches by 3.5 inches, roughly the same size as a credit card. Excellent! Perfect size for achieving the goal of fitting in a wallet. All right, fine.

But unfortunately this story doesn’t have a happy ending. Even if the CDC designed the card at this size, it is not the size the cards ultimately reached. My vaccination card measures 10 “by 3” – too big to fit in a wallet. There is nothing on the card to suggest folding it. Plus, folding it in half makes 2 inches by 3 inches (so much math today). It’s smaller than a credit card and just so small that it slips into a card slot and is difficult to dig out.

What happened between those emails promising a card that fits in wallets and the vaccination campaign that gave everyone cards that don’t fit in wallets that easily? This is where things get blurry and it’s a mystery I still haven’t solved. The CDC did not respond to a request for comment. Maybe at some point someone just clicked the wrong button on a printer. But maybe there is a lesson here: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions – and annoyingly shaped cardboard.