ROME – Almost as soon as authorities in the Mediterranean announced that no one who was not vaccinated against COVID-19 would be able to visit Sardinia, Cyprus or the Greek islands this summer, counterfeit vaccine certificates began to appear for sale on the black market for around € 100 The piece. And now that Europe’s vaccination program is in full swing and the standard state-required health cards you get after receiving COVID injections are readily available for creative counterfeiters to copy, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how a relatively false document cheap could allow anyone who has not been able or unwilling to get the real vaccine, but still wants a sunny beach vacation, to escape entry controls.
European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has strongly supported the introduction of a “COVID passport” that would allow tourists to bypass quarantines and even invasive brain tick smear tests if they can prove they have been inoculated. “It is a medical requirement to have a certificate proving that you have been vaccinated,” she said last week, after a measure was introduced by Greece to make the vaccination passport mandatory for travel across the EU, as well as for anyone traveling to many African countries. to prove that they had a yellow fever vaccine.
But the practice of standardizing this so-called “proof” of vaccination will take much longer than the short months leading up to the summer to be implemented, which means that fraudulent vaccine certificates are not the only problem that challenges the European Union’s interim plans. trying to save the summer holiday season. The biggest concern is that the 27 Member States in Europe, which have difficulty agreeing on almost everything, will somehow come to an agreement on what vaccination evidence should look like in practice.
Many countries are already moving forward with their own version of special entry permits. Denmark has already implemented a plan to offer digital vaccination passports to its vaccinated citizens to allow free travel within the country. Estonia is introducing an electronic yellow card, which would allow vaccinated travelers to update their health records in an app. And in Iceland, which is not part of the EU, but which benefits from the Schengen open border treaty, vaccination passports are already obtained in lieu of the COVID-19 smear test before arrival.
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Poland, Portugal and Spain have legislation for vaccination passports ready for parliamentary voting and in Hungary “proof of immunity” in the form of vaccination or an antibody test showing full recovery from the virus, is sufficient to circumvent the quarantine requirements. In Italy, which is undergoing a delicate governmental transition, several measures have been introduced on how to guarantee the validity of this document, given the country’s experience with fraudulent organized crime. While in France, the tourism industry accused the government of “dragging its feet” on a comprehensive plan that could include upgradeable digital certificates instead of a passport that could include the traveler’s COVID history, from testing to immunity.
The UK, now excluded from the EU thanks to Brexit, is also considering its own mark of proof of immunity that would allow vaccinated people to go to restaurants, pubs and – if other countries allow – the airport.
But the introduction of a vaccine passport or any document that considers someone “immune” goes beyond the obvious logistics challenge. The simple fact that currently only rich countries have the best access to vaccines and tests prevents a whole segment of the population from dreaming of hitting the road to Europe, making discrimination another issue that the EU may be willing to foster by demanding vaccines as a shortcut to holidays.
Many companies across Europe, and even at the Vatican in Rome, have warned that employees are at risk of losing their jobs if they refuse an injection they guarantee is available. But there are countless other countries that have not yet been able to get their vaccination programs underway due to a shortage of supplies, thanks to the richer countries swallowing the vials, and that simply do not yet have the type of infrastructure to deliver vaccines to the willing, the more it requires skeptics to be vaccinated.
But none of these efforts to return to normal will work unless all countries agree to recognize proof of immunity, whether by antibodies or one of the many vaccines. “For certificates to work internationally, they must be recognized by countries around the world,” said Swedish social minister Lena Hallengren this week. And that may still be the biggest challenge.
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