EU’s Covid certificates for travel on anvil

Only 0.3% of all Covid vaccines was given to poorer nations, rues WHO

BRUSSELS: The European Parliament on Thursday agreed with plans for a Covid-19 certificate and how it should work, taking the EU closer to launching a document to open up travel within the bloc.

Europe intends to have a certificate showing the bearer’s vaccination status, Covid-19 test results and/or evidence of having survived the disease up until June, in time for the continent’s summer vacation period.

While technical work has been ongoing to ensure the certificate is recognised across all 27 EU member states, final details have to be worked out involving capitals, the European Commission and the parliament.

The first change MEPs have called for to a commission proposal is the name. Instead of a “digital green certificate” they want to call it an “EU Covid-19 certificate” - to avoid any implication of it becoming a “vaccine passport”.

They said the document should “neither serve as travel document nor become a precondition to exercise the right to free movement” and should only be in use for 12 months.

Stressing that the certificate should not result in discrimination, parliament demanded that Covid-19 tests for travel should be free of charge.

The parliament’s negotiation position was announced on Thursday following a vote late on Wednesday, with 540 MEPs in favour, 119 against, and 31 abstentions.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen welcomed the result, but ignored the proposed renaming of the certificate.

LISBON/MEXICO CITY: The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has pointed out that more than 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered globally, but as much as 82% of them were given in high and upper-middle-income countries. Director-general Tedros Adhanom lamented that just 0.3% of all vaccines administered so far was given to people in lowincome nations.

“That’s the reality,” Tedros told an online health conference hosted by Portugal on Thursday. He said access to vaccines “is one of the defining challenges of the pandemic” and that public health is “the foundation of social, economic and political stability”.

Pandemic accelerating: WHO Americas office

The pandemic is accelerating, which is why equitable access to vaccines and effective preventive measures are crucial to helping turn the tide, the head of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.

“Our region is still under the grip of this pandemic... in several countries of South America the pandemic in the first four months of this year was worse than what we faced in 2020,” PAHO director Carissa Etienne has said.

“This shows that we will only overcome this pandemic with a combination of rapid and equitable vaccine access and effective preventive measures. This pandemic is not only not over, it is accelerating,” she added.

Over the past week, more than 1.4 million people became infected with Covid-19 in the region and over 36,000 died from complications related to the disease, meaning that one in four coronavirus deaths reported worldwide last week were in the Americas.

Etienne pointed to Canada’s infection rates, which surpassed US figures for the first time since the start of the pandemic.