Spain backs vaccine passport concept
Tourism chiefs are ‘working on the idea’ so it can be prepared
AS the vaccine rollout gathers pace, many countries including Spain are debating the possibility of creating some kind of ‘passport’ to enable people who have been inoculated against Covid-19 to travel abroad.
A negative test result was already required for entry from at risk countries, including the UK, when travel was allowed between them late last year.
Tourism minister Reyes Maroto said on Wednesday that the Spanish government supports the initiative proposed by Greece, and any other measure that would allow ‘safe journeys’, once the situation is under control.
At a meeting with entrepreneurs, she defended the idea of a common vaccination framework and therefore also ‘a passport’.
She expressed confidence that Spain would soon be seen as ‘a country open to the world’ with safe ‘tourism protocols’.
The minister would not give any kind of timeframe for such an instrument, because ‘the most urgent and important matter’ is to contain the pandemic, and this is what the government is ‘focusing its efforts on’.
Likewise, the idea of tourism over Easter was left unanswered because any kind of reopening ‘will depend on the epidemiological data improving’.
Nevertheless, since the curve of infections is dropping, she said her team is working on the idea of a passport so that it could be prepared.
As yet there is no clear European consensus, with Italy also in favour but some EU countries, including France and Romania, expressing opposition, claiming it would be discriminatory and that the vaccination programme is not sufficiently advanced yet.
A few, including Denmark and Sweden have announced digital vaccine certificates that could enable travel in the summer.
There are also doubts about the security and data protection issues of any such document, and the WHO has expressed concern that it is not yet clear to what extend the vaccines prevent transmission or just prevent infections from resulting in serious illness.
While Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis wrote to European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen last month defending the idea of a certificate to simplify trips within the EU, his proposal did not imply that vaccination would be a requisite for travel, but that it would offer those who have been inoculated certainty that they could.
The UK government had been consistently ruling out the idea of a travel passport, but on Wednesday PM Boris Johnson suggested that apps could enable vaccinated Britons to travel internationally.
He said it was still too soon for people to be certain about what they might be able to do this summer.
Speaking before him, transport secretary Grant Shapps said they are in talks with governments, including
the United States and Singapore, and the United Nations aviation body about an international system.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) airline trade association has been developing its own ‘Travel Pass’ app, ‘to support a world in which we need verified health credentials to travel’.
They say it would ‘give travellers the solution to securely store and present their verified vaccine or testing information to governments and airlines as needed’.