EU READY TO ALLOW VISITS FROM VACCINATED AMERICANS IN SUMMER

American tourists who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will be able to visit the European Union over the summer, the head of the bloc’s executive body said in an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, more than a year after shutting down nonessential travel from most countries to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

The fast pace of vaccination in the United States, and advanced talks between U.S. authorities and the European Union over how to make vaccine certificates acceptable as proof of immunity for visitors, will enable the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, to recommend a switch in policy that could see trans-Atlantic leisure travel restored.

“The Americans, as far as I can see, use European Medicines Agency-approved vaccines,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said Sunday in an interview. “This will enable free movement and the travel to the European Union.

“Because one thing is clear: All 27 member states will accept, unconditionally, all those who are vaccinated with vaccines that are approved by EMA,” she added. The agency, the bloc’s drugs regulator, has approved all three vaccines being used in the U.S., namely the Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson shots.

Von der Leyen did not offer a timeline on when tourist travel might open up or details on how it would occur. But her comments are a toplevel statement that the current travel restrictions are set to change on the basis of vaccination certificates.

She said the U.S. was “on track” and making “huge progress” with its campaign to reach herd immunity, or the vaccination of 70 percent of adults, by mid-June.

She added that resumption of travel would depend “on the epidemiological situation, but the situation is improving in the United States, as it is, hopefully, also improving in the European Union.”

Diplomats from Europe’s tourist destination countries, mostly led by Greece, have argued for weeks that the bloc’s criteria for determining whether a country is a “safe” origin purely based on low cases of COVID-19 are fast becoming irrelevant given the progress of vaccination campaigns in the U.S., Britain and other countries.

Technical discussions have been going on for weeks between EU and U.S. officials on how to practically and technologically make vaccine certificates from each place readable so that citizens can use them to travel without restrictions.