Staples will Laminate Your Vaccine Card for Free Until May 1st

Staples is offering a new free service: they will laminate your vaccine card! They will vaccinate the cards for free through May 1 at stores nationwide, said a representative to McClatchy News. According to Yahoo! News, there is a limit of one per customer and should be laminated after being fully vaccinated. These cards could become more useful in the future, depending on travel and employment restrictions.

But what even is a vaccination card? It is a white card, about the size of an index card, that lists the version of the vaccine you had, the date and where you received the vaccination. It also lists your appointment day for the second shot.

The lamination will only hurt the card if it “has stickers that were printed using a thermal printer,” said Staples. This lamination process could turn that sticker black and ruin it.

A way to find this out is scratching the sticker with your fingernail. If it turns black, try photocopying the card and getting that laminated instead. The cards have the potential of being used in the future.

“What these little cards have the potential to do is to make something like international travel easier by avoiding requirements for quarantine or testing,” Dr. Anesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told ABC.

This would make things easier in the future because people might avoid quarantining or testing because they got the vaccine. However, there is nothing set in stone. This does have potential to get life back to where it was before the pandemic, if a vaccine “passport” is something that happens in the near future.