Will the vaccine be mandatory for travel?
While most states are reluctant, given the context of vaccine hesitancy, to consider mandatory vaccination for their populations, in practice, it could become so. The indication comes from airlines, primarily the Australian company Qantas, whose president announced that passengers would need to be vaccinated to travel on their planes.
This announcement, echoed worldwide, caused concern. “When vaccination hides behind denied access to leisure,” can be read on social media, “tomorrow, they’ll deny travel, theater, cinema to those who don’t want to get vaccinated.”
These fears are unfounded, as the Australian stance remains marginal for now. However, it could be followed by other countries if they considered entries without vaccination as a public health risk. Legally, state sovereignty in health matters is preeminent. Moreover, the idea is not new since many countries already require travelers to be vaccinated against endemic diseases (such as yellow fever, for example) before allowing them to set foot on their soil.
For the moment, airlines worldwide are cautious about making vaccination mandatory. It will take months before vaccination campaigns become widespread, especially in Europe or the United States. Their priority is thus to test passengers using rapid antigen tests, although these are less reliable than PCR tests. This remains the position of the three global airline alliances (Oneworld, Star Alliance, and SkyTeam) that represent 60% of passengers. However, they do mention the implementation of a “health passport” that would digitally centralize passenger data on Covid-19. Such a passport could summarize the tests conducted and, obviously, indicate if the traveler is vaccinated.
Such a passport is already being tested for a few days at Heathrow Airport in London. The “CommonPass,” developed by the Swiss NGO The Commons Project and supported by the World Economic Forum in Davos (the same one criticized by the documentary Hold-UP as the master orchestrator of the current pandemic), would allow for the elimination of paper test (and later vaccination) certificates, which are easily falsifiable. These digital passports will likely continue after the Covid-19 crisis to prevent other potential epidemics. The application could also eventually replace the paper passport.
