At what point is the health passport for the summer?
The European Union is accelerating the creation of a health passport to standardize travel starting in the summer. The deepening of El Pais
The European Union, writes El Pais , is accelerating the creation of a " health passport " to standardize travel starting in the summer. Under pressure from partners in the south, especially Spain and Greece, the EU-27 agreed during the virtual summit on Thursday to start work on a digital certificate that will indicate whether its carrier has been vaccinated, has antibodies or tested negative. to covid-19 in a recent test. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen warned that countries " will have to work fast" if they are to have it ready by the summer, as the technical development of such a system takes at least three months. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the document could also revive travel with countries outside the EU.
Greece, with more vehemence, and Spain, with more patience, managed to exert pressure with the other southern countries (Italy, Cyprus and Malta) to move forward in the creation of this passport. Requests from Athens had doubled since last Monday when Boris Johnson gave a de-escalation prospect. And while this will be slow and gradual, this announcement was enough for large airlines and tour groups to go public in the heat of the wave of bookings they have received from the UK.
The passport proposal, however, has raised perplexity in France and Germany, who believe it is still too early to send the signal that Europe can think of immediately recovering normalcy. The statement signed by the leaders, in fact, recalls that " the epidemiological situation remains serious and the new variants pose new challenges ". " Non-essential travel must be limited, but the measures must be proportional, " said the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
However, EU sources explain that there was " growing support " for a digital certificate during the meeting, which some members also considered useful for restoring social life within the countries. The EU-27 has not definitively closed the creation of the certificate, but Merkel expressed in her press conference after the Council the consensus that this proposal has finally generated. " Everyone agreed that we need a digital vaccination certificate ," he said in Berlin.
Von der Leyen, more cautious, did not want to anticipate the decision taken by the EU partners, but indicated the same direction by recalling that companies like Google and Apple are already offering their certificates to the market. " It is important to have a European solution, " he said. However, he recalled that some issues still need to be clarified. In the political field, some partners fear that this certificate could create discrimination among its citizens; in the scientific field, it is necessary to carefully analyze whether those who have been vaccinated can spread the virus, although Von der Leyen said that the studies from Israel are promising.
According to Moncloa sources, the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, defended these certificates as a " valid and useful tool " and claimed to continue working on its design at the community level to " prevent each country from developing its own formula, preventing unfair situations and ensure the protection of personal data ". The Commission offers to coordinate the standards of the certificate and its technical aspects. Less problematic, Von der Leyen said, is the content of the passport, which will be minimal: proof that the person has been vaccinated, a negative PCR, or a certificate stating that they have the antibodies.
The European Union also wants to avoid at all costs having to face a new escalation of infections after the brutal wave of winter. With the pharmaceutical industry, and AstraZeneca in particular, struggling to step up production of the covid-19 vaccine, EU leaders have called for " urgent acceleration " of licensing, manufacturing and distribution processes. Furthermore, they urge companies to “respect the contractual delivery terms” acquired with Brussels.
The European vaccination campaign got off to a difficult start. In just two months, he managed to inject the two doses to 2.5% of the European population, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The EU still has some way to go to immunize its most vulnerable citizens, as only 10.5% of those over 80 have been fully vaccinated so far. With these numbers, any delay in deliveries is a blow, especially since vaccination is the key to achieving decongestion of European health systems. The new delays from Moderna and AstraZeneca have warned the 27, who are still waiting to reach cruising speed from the second quarter, when they expect to also start receiving orders from Janssen and have 380 million doses available.
At their second videoconference summit to address the health crisis, EU heads of state and government raised a multitude of issues a la Von der Leyen. According to EU sources, EU leaders, including Mario Draghi for the first time, have put on the table the delays they have been suffering from almost the start of the campaign, the difficulties of speeding up production in Europe, the need to have a predictable schedule of deliveries or the urgent need for greater transparency in terms of production and export of vaccines by pharmaceutical groups. The EU-27 also fears that the emergence of a variant that undermines the effectiveness of vaccines could amplify all these problems.
Von der Leyen said at a press conference after Brussels was still trying to " tackle bottlenecks " in both manufacturing and the supply chain, adding that those efforts paid off in part, with 45 plants now producing. the vaccine. The EU also complained about delivery delays, which even sparked a war between Brussels and Britain's AstraZeneca. " Companies must ensure the predictability of their vaccine production and respect contractual delivery terms ", say the leaders, who also ask for "transparency". EU leaders then called on Brussels to be stricter in banning vaccine exports in the case of companies that fail to meet their commitments.
(Extract from the press review of Eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/passaporto-sanitario-unione-europea/ on Sat, 27 Feb 2021 07:00:57 +0000.