Vaccine passports essential for resumption of international travel | Flights | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/jan/22/vaccine-passports-essential-for-resumption-of-international-travel-says
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The World Tourism Organisation says international coordination, standardised certification and harmonised testing protocols all needed for safe travel to restart. In future, passengers may have to prove they’ve been vaccinated before boarding a flight.Vaccine passports must become essential travel documents in order to restart international tourism.The recommendation comes from the Global Tourism Crisis Committee, which met in Madrid this week to discuss measures to ensure the safe resumption of international travel. It called for international health and travel bodies to step up the coordination of a standardised digital certification system, as well as harmonised testing protocols.The meeting, organised by the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), took place against a backdrop of rising coronavirus cases and new strains of the virus prompting the UK to shut down all travel corridors, require all arrivals into the UK to quarantine and a total ban on arrivals from South America and Portugal.
The UNWTO secretary-general, Zurab Pololikashvili, said: “The rollout of vaccines is a step in the right direction, but the restart of tourism cannot wait. Vaccines must be part of a wider, coordinated approach that includes certificates and passes for safe cross-border travel.”
Dr Richard Dawood, a specialist in travel medicine at the Fleet Street Clinic in London, said proof of vaccination in order to travel is inevitable. “It won’t really be our choice – [vaccine passports] will de facto be a requirement by individual countries to prove immunity.” He said existing international health regulations, for example the requirement for yellow fever certificate to enter certain countries, means the framework for a global approach already exists. “The ground work has been laid.” The issue will be around how to implement a secure system. “At the moment people in the UK are given a bit of paper once they’ve been vaccinated. It’s not exactly secure. There needs to be some fair consideration at some point to how we will keep records of vaccinations without burdening the NHS. [For health passports to work] we need a way to authenticate vaccines.”
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