PARIS / SYDNEY (Reuters) – The head of a global travel organization on Monday opposed making the COVID-19 vaccination a requirement for travelers in the fight against the pandemic, despite skepticism about how to achieve collective immunity this year .
Several health experts said during the Reuters Next conference that the mass launch of coronavirus vaccines would not result in enough people with immunity to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Some lawmakers have proposed that immunization should be mandatory for air travel, as the world intensifies the battle to stem the spread of COVID-19, and Australia’s Qantas Airways said it plans to introduce such a requirement.
But Gloria Guevara, chief executive of the World Travel and Tourism Council, said such measures would be similar to discrimination in the workplace.
“We should never require vaccination to get a job or travel,” said Guevara, whose organization represents a sector responsible for up to 10% of global employment, in a Reuters Next panel.
“If you need vaccinations before your trip, that leads to discrimination.”
She was supported by AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes, who said that global testing protocols remain the key to unlocking travel.
His comments contrasted with most online viewers in an instant survey that supported the vaccine requirement.
The contrasting views highlighted the difficulties in reaching agreement on ways to defeat COVID-19 as the number of deaths from the virus and its economic consequences increases.
More than 90 million people have been infected with the new coronavirus worldwide and about 1.9 million have died of the disease since it first appeared in China in December 2019, according to a Reuters count.
MASS VACCINATION
Countries such as the United States, Singapore and European states have started to launch vaccines such as those developed by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, Moderna and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca alongside the University of Oxford.
Indonesia and India plan to start mass vaccinations later this week.
But Dale Fisher, president of the World Health Organization (WHO) Outbreak Alert and Response Network, said: “We are not going to get back to normal quickly.”
He was cautious about the chances that countries would quickly achieve collective immunity.
“We know that we need to get collective immunity and we need that in most countries, so we won’t see that in 2021,” Fisher told Reuters Next. “There may be some countries that can achieve this, but even so it will not create ‘normal’, especially in terms of border controls.”
That was the best scenario, based on current knowledge of vaccines being launched, said Fisher.
Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia, said at the conference that some governments rely too much on the vaccines to come and that means that collective immunity cannot be achieved in the short term.
Irma Hidayana, co-founder of LaporCOVID-19, an independent coronavirus data initiative, based in Indonesia, said public confidence in vaccines could have an impact on the launch.
Another problem, said Fisher, was uncertainty about the virus’s ability to mutate further.
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Editing by Timothy Heritage and Alexander Smith