ROME – Almost as soon as Mediterranean authorities announced that no one vaccinated against COVID-19 could visit Sardinia, Cyprus or the Greek islands this summer, counterfeit vaccination certificates began to sell on the black market for around € 100 per piece. And now that the European vaccination program is in full swing and the standardized health cards obtained by the state upon receipt of the COVID jabs are readily available for creative counterfeiters to copy, it does not take much imagination to see how a relatively inexpensive false document can not be. allow someone who has not yet been able or wanted to get the right vaccine, but still wants a sunny beach holiday, to sneak in at the entrance controls.
The president of the European Union Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has introduced a “COVID passport” that allows tourists to bypass quarantines, and even support invasive brain-chilling tests, if they can prove that they have been vaccinated is. “It is a medical requirement to have a certificate proving that you have been vaccinated,” she said last week, after Greece introduced a measure to make vaccination passports compulsory for EU travel, just like those after many African countries travel. to prove that they had a vaccine against yellow fever.
But the practice of standardizing this so-called ‘proof’ of vaccination will take much longer to institute, which means that fraudulent vaccination certificates are not the only problem facing the European Union’s preliminary plans to try. to save the summer holiday season. The biggest concern is that Europe’s 27 member states, which find it difficult to agree on almost anything, will somehow come together to agree on what vaccination evidence should look like in practice.
Many countries are already moving with their own version of the special access permits. Denmark has already put in place a plan to offer digital vaccination passports to citizens who are vaccinated to enable free travel within the country. Estonia is introducing an e-yellow card with which vaccinated travelers can update their health record on an app. And in Iceland, which is not part of the EU but does benefit from the open border Schengen treaty, vaccination passports are taken before arrival instead of COVID-19 spot testing.
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Poland, Portugal and Spain have vaccination passports ready for parliamentary votes, and in Hungary ‘proof of immunity’ in the form of vaccination or an antibody test showing the recovery of the virus is enough to meet the requirement for quarantine satisfy. In Italy, which is undergoing a delicate government transition, several measures have been put in place on how to ensure the validity of such a document, given the country’s experience with fraudulent organized crime. While in France, the tourism sector accused the government of ‘dragging its feet’ on a comprehensive plan that could include updated digital certificates instead of a passport that could cover a traveler’s COVID history including, from tests to immunity.
The UK, which has now been shut down outside the EU thanks to Brexit, is also considering its own brand of immunity enabling people who are vaccinated to go to restaurants, pubs and – if other countries allow it – to the airport.
But setting up a vaccine passport or any document that someone considers ‘immune’ goes beyond the logical challenge. The mere fact that only the rich countries currently have the best access to vaccines and their testing, prevents a whole section of the population from even dreaming about the road to Europe, which makes discrimination another problem, which the EU can willingly promote by requiring vaccines as a shortcut to holidays.
Many companies in Europe, and even the Vatican in Rome, have warned that employees could lose their jobs if they refuse a chance to make it available. But there are numerous other countries that have not yet been able to get their vaccination programs up and running due to the shortage of supplies due to the rich countries that collect the vials, and that just do not yet have the kind of infrastructure to even offer vaccines. the willing, to say the least, of the skeptics demanding to be vaccinated.
But none of these attempts to return to normal will work unless all countries agree to recognize evidence of immunity, either by antibodies or by one of the many vaccines. “For certificates to work internationally, they must be recognized by countries around the world,” Sweden’s Social Affairs Minister Lena Hallengren said this week. And that can still be the biggest challenge.
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