ARCHIVED - EU leaders debate details of proposed international Covid passport scheme
The resumption of international tourism will depend on Covid-free travel guarantees
It is the widely stated aim of governments throughout Europe to begin re-allowing international travel by the summer of 2021 – in the UK, coronavirus data permitting, this may be the case as early as 17th May - and the topic of how this might be made possible in a pandemic environment is the subject of considerable debate.
The EU is in favour of the creation of “health passports” for travellers, an idea which has met with a certain amount of opposition in Britain, and although the political implications of such a scheme still need to be considered, according to Ursula von der Leyen, it has been agreed by the heads of member states this week that this process should go ahead with a view to the plans being finalized for the summer.
To develop a uniform procedure concerning vaccination certificates and health passports a period of at least three months will be needed, though, and as a result there is disagreement over whether it is feasible to plan for it to be up and running by the summer.
While Mediterranean countries depending heavily on summer tourism are keen for the idea to become a reality by July, other governments are more guarded in their approach to using a “health passport” for tourism so early. In addition, there is still some uncertainty over the extent to which different vaccines offer protection against Covid, and more importantly, whether vaccinees are still able to transmit the virus even after being vaccinated themselves, leading some to be sceptical over the effectiveness of the health passport scheme.
It is not yet clear exactly what information would be contained in the document being proposed, but it is reported that the different views expressed by member states are now gradually converging. What seems certain is that it would specify at least whether a person has been vaccinated and whether he or she is producing antibodies, and the details of any recent negative PCR test would also be included.
The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, stresses the need for the EU to decide on a uniform scheme to avoid a situation where each country creates its own rules, while his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, warns that if the Union cannot reach agreement then the private sector will soon create its own equivalent documentation. This would not constitute a “health passport” but could generate safe corridors for tourism between individual countries.
A further complication is that, as the vice-president of the European Commission for Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight, Maros Sefkovic, has pointed out, there is no evidence to support the use of vaccination certificates for international travel, as it has not been proven that the recipient of a vaccine is immune to contagion and therefore cannot propagate the virus.
Now that the UK is no longer within the EU, it is not clear whether any “European model” would be imitated by the British authorities, or could even potentially include the UK, but if EU countries were to insist on compatible documentation being issued to visitors from the UK it would doubtless create pressure on Boris Johnson’s government to comply, forcing it to make decisions about the ethical implications of a Covid passport, a topic currently causing considerable debate about human rights and privacy issues in the UK.
Added to which is the thorny topic of vaccinations; the stated aim of the EU to vaccinate 70% of adults before recommending widespread travel thwarted by the lack of vaccines across Europe. Spain is amongst the governments aiming to reach this target before encouraging international travel, yet still in the very basic stages of its vaccination programme; UK citizens may find themselves fully vaccinated and ready to travel, yet unable to enter countries not yet ready to receive them.
This week there has been a considerable surge of activity on booking sites for Spanish destinations following the presentation of a roadmap for England which indicated that international travel could resume after May 17th; whether Spain will be ready to relax its own restrictions by that date remains to be seen as this week it extended the ban on British, Brazilian and south-American travellers for a further two weeks and has also extended its border closure with Portugal due to the risks associated with the spread of the new variants.