Support for Covid-19 vaccine passports grows, with European and Chinese backing

EU leaders hope it will take three months to get the program up and running.

“The goal is to gradually train them [EU citizens] to travel safely within the European Union or abroad – for work or tourism, ”said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Last week, the UK also said it was looking at the pros and cons of digital passports after initially discarding them.

The Biden administration did not say whether Covid-19 vaccines would be taken into account in US travel requirements. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to issue guidelines on the subject and claim that there are no established international standards for vaccines or vaccination documentation.

“Until then, all air passengers traveling to the U.S., regardless of vaccination or antibody status, are required to provide a negative Covid-19 test result or recovery documentation,” said CDC spokeswoman Caitlin Shockey .

Many disease experts and the World Health Organization are afraid of vaccine passports, saying it is still unclear whether vaccinated individuals may or may not spread the virus. Governments, however, are increasingly accepting the idea as a potentially useful tool to sustain the post-pandemic economic recovery.

China’s action marks a departure from its previous skepticism about vaccine passports. His Foreign Ministry said Beijing was ready to explore the issue, “in order to provide a reliable guarantee for a new healthy, safe and regulated order for the exchange of people between countries.”

China now hopes to inoculate 40% of its population by the end of July, up from the current 3.56%, according to Zhong Nanshan, head of the Chinese vaccine research and development committee Covid-19.

Chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Wu Zunyou, said the United States could achieve 90% herd immunity by August and proposed opening travel between the U.S. and China if it did.

“If we could remove all political barriers, based only on science, the two countries could be the first to remove all barriers for free travel,” said Wu.

For his supporters, vaccine passports would allow business and tourism trips to resume, helping the economies affected by the pandemic to rebuild. In the past year, many countries have completely banned incoming travelers and many still impose costly testing and quarantine requirements on visitors and returnees.

Among the strongest supporters of the idea are airlines and countries dependent on tourism, who are pushing to normalize international travel as much as possible until the summer.

The International Air Transport Association is due to launch an app this month that allows travelers to upload a photo of their vaccination documents. These photos would be verified, with staff and software checking whether, for example, the clinic listed in the document exists and has provided vaccines.

Eventually, travelers should be able to scan their face and thumb at the airport to move freely across borders, said IATA senior vice president Nick Careen. Some countries can join the system, while others can refuse.

Since the fall, the association has been trying to garner support from WHO for its proposal, he said, but has made limited progress.

“We are moving forward without them … We have countries that will collapse if they are unable to receive tourists and are not small countries: Spain, Greece, Thailand,” said Careen.

In Europe, the issue pitted tourism-importing places like Cyprus and Greece, which are eager to revive international travel in the summer, against countries like Belgium, France and Germany, which are more cautious. Among his concerns is the risk that discrimination against unvaccinated people will be politically problematic in countries like France, where research shows that about half of the population is hesitant to receive an injection.

The WHO has so far refused to support a vaccine travel certificate, saying it needs more information. At the root, there are two problems: immunologists still do not know how easily vaccinated people can spread the virus involuntarily, although early indications suggest that this risk may be low.

Second, some WHO leaders have expressed concern that allowing vaccinated people to travel freely while maintaining border closures and quarantines mandatory for others may be discriminatory: 75% of all doses administered so far have been in only 10 countries, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in February.

Vaccine passports would tend to “restrict travel more than they allow,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO emergency program, last month. “We don’t see this as an immediate requirement or need, but certainly one that will have to be discussed in the coming months.”

While some epidemiologists see vaccine passports as a possible way to encourage further adoption, others fear that new variants of the disease will spread if people can cross borders again, and want to see Europe and North America impose the kind of strict travel ban and mandatory quarantines in hotels in New Zealand and Australia.

Governments must eliminate the disease before allowing visitors and then only allow travelers from other places who have eradicated the virus, said Deepti Gurdasani, a senior professor at Queen Mary University in London, who opposes vaccine exemptions.

“We really need to rethink our strategy in this regard,” she said. “From a scientific point of view, it doesn’t make sense now. This kind of thing leads to a false sense of security. “

—Jonathan Cheng, Raffaele Huang and Sabrina Siddiqui contributed to this article.

Write to Drew Hinshaw at [email protected] and Jason Douglas at [email protected]