Travellers into Spain will be required to present digital vaccine passports from May, the country’s Tourism Minister has announced. The Mail has the story.
Sunny Spanish holidays could be back on for Britons within weeks as the tourism minister revealed a vaccine passport system was planned for the middle of May.
It comes after Greece announced plans to reopen to holidaymakers from mid-May and Cyprus said it would welcome fully-vaccinated Britons from May 1st.
But those hoping to jet off for the Early May bank holiday are set to be barred by UK authorities because Boris Johnson has said he won’t allow overseas leisure travel until at least May 17th.
Spain’s tourism minister Reyes Maroto told a radio station on Wednesday: “We could be in a position to start implementing the digital passport (when the tourism fair FITUR starts on May 19th).”
Under the Government’s roadmap for England, this would mean that holidaymakers could fly freely to Spain – providing they had their jabs and the country hadn’t be [sic] added to the dreaded “red list” from which entry to the UK is banned over Covid variant fears.
This would prevent those who do not take the vaccine from being able to travel to Spain, among other countries. But even those who are fully vaccinated may not be permitted to holiday abroad by mid-May. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, who promised in January that he would personally stand “on the barricades” if all of our freedoms were not returned in March, said: “I am hopeful [about holidaying in May] but, as with everything to do with this virus, you can’t say for certain.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Greece will open its borders to British holidaymakers on May 14th. Britons who have either had both doses of the vaccine or can produce a negative test will not face any restrictions. Greece’s refusal to exclude the unvaccinated is a sign that post-lockdown(s), countries may be reluctant to restrict tourism for fear of limiting their economic recoveries.
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Great,that means I will never go to Spain again.Go fuck yourself hombre!
And so it begins…it doesn’t stop here either.
Feels like a vax promo story for the proles to me. Spain won’t want to miss another year of no Brits. Imagine the hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated kids arriving en mass this summer. Seems unworkable.
Until there is conclusive scientific evidence that any vaccinated person (regardless which type they’ve had) is not capable of contracting or transmitting the virus I don’t see why these things are even being discussed as it’s a pointless endeavor. A plane full of vaccinated or unvaccinated people still contains the same risk to a country…
Conversely, a recovered COVID patient will be immune from the disease for many months, maybe years. This fact alone proves these “vaccine passports” are nothing to do with preventing transmission of a disease. If it was, the passport would be offered to those with immunity, not to those willing to obey their governments orders.
Agreed, but like Guy de la Bedoyere I need to be able to travel., so am reluctantly having the vaccine today. I realise this is consent by coercion.
I remember flying into Malaga on a work trip a few years ago and being herded into a sweaty, hot corridor with thousands of other arrivals, crammed in like sardines for hours. They had just installed their fantastic new facial scanning system, which wasn’t fit for purpose.
Okay then, that’s Spain off the list!
And the Mark of the Beast rollout begins…
Watch out for some nifty Spanish backtracking as other European holiday destinations follow the Greek approach.
A negative test certificate is a much cheaper price to pay than a vaccine now that Covid in the community has virtually disappeared.
With low prevalence in the community, the risks of false positive test results increase quickly.
Not quite. The risk of getting a false positive stays exactly the same regardless of prevalence (perhaps 1 in 300 for LFT, way more for PCR). The risk of getting a genuine positive is what drops under low prevalence. So the percentage of positive results that are incorrect increases, but the absolute risk is the same.
Yes, i should have said, ‘relative’ risk, rather than ‘absolute’ risk. What does change the absolute risk for either test is the number of tests conducted under pillar 2 in say a 24 hour period. The risk of a contaminated sample or something else can increase substantially as under-equipped testing centres and/or lighthouse labs are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tests.
I have just commented at length on the ‘I have taken the job’ article, so will not repeat myself.
There is no justification for imposing requirements for people to be injected by an emergency use drug for anything, and certainly not travel. The Mail article is typically short on the facts. The EU are considering a pass of some sort, which would aid travellers. But this decision will be taken by Heads of State, not Brussels. There is a lot of ethical positions to be discussed and possibly agreed. It is already clear that the high percentage of non-injected people in some nations will mean there is a requirement to deal with their position equitably. An EU or Schengen-wide pass will have to include negative tests, and not just PCRs, as well as positive anti-body tests.
No doubt some nations will want to jump the gun and try to introduce their own requirements, but it would be an interesting test in front of ECHR say Spain insisted on ‘vaccines’ for UK travellers, but only antigen negative tests for French ones for instance.
This is a potential legal minefield to say nothing about ethics and practibility.
On a more general note, I fear the psyop is alive and kicking in the LDS with two fairly significant pro-vaccine articles tonight.
The ridiculousness of this need only require you to point out that the average planeful of excited Spanish holidaymakers will comprise 50% adults and 50% under 16s for which the vax is neither approved nor tested. So let’s say you exclude children from the vax requirement, what on earth is the point of requiring it from the adults? It’s nonsensical. Market forces will ensure there’s plenty of travel options for the unvaxxed, albeit testing is not going away any time soon.
The World Health Organisation is still opposed to the use of vaccine certification to control access to travel or to discriminate against people in social and economic terms. I wonder how long it will be for the WHO changes its position?