Vaccine passport travel8/17/2023 Many companies in both the travel and the tech world are developing such digital passport prototypes. Israel, which leads the world in percentage of population already vaccinated, is working on what it calls "green passports," which free those vaccinated from most restrictions, according to the Jerusalem Post. Greece, for example, whose economy depends heavily on tourism, has taken the lead in lobbying the European Commission, the EU's executive body, to move quickly to prepare a "framework" for vaccine certificates that would be accepted by all member states, as both London's Sunday Timesand V oice of America reported recently. They are the dream, too, of travel agents, tour operators, cruise lines, hotel companies, and tourism boards, who are all as desperate to get the business of travel going again (and to keep both their customers and their employees safe) as we are to travel (and to feel safe doing so). The digital health passports are the Holy Grail of the age of Covid. The dream is a digital health passport that would announce to the world that we have been vaccinated against Covid-19 and are therefore good to go-something we could brandish to board planes and cruise ships, cross borders, check into hotels, and be exempted, as well, perhaps, from tests and quarantines. ![]() (And subsequently for Moderna's vaccine.) That yellow card is the old-school, analog version of what all of us desperate to travel once again have been dreaming of since December 11, 2020: the day the FDA issued its first emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech. (Mine is dated 2008, and the last time I needed to produce it was in 2019, to obtain a visa for Ghana, one of the 17 African countries that currently require it for entry.) While the "yellow card," as it is colloquially known, has space for many shots and the dates they were administered, the only entry in mine-and in the certificates of most frequent travelers these days-is yellow fever. ![]() All of us who travel in Africa have for years kept tucked into our passports a tattered yellow booklet titled "International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis," approved by the World Health Organization.
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