The UK government is raising growing discontent for its refusal to acknowledge that visitors have been vaccinated unless they have been vaccinated in a few select countries. Under travel rules unveiled last week, fully vaccinated people from countries such as the US, Israel and Australia will be able to enter England without being quarantined from October 4. However, people who have been vaccinated from large parts of the world still face stricter restrictions, including a 10-day period of isolation at home.
The procedure is valid even if the visitor has received a vaccine that has already been approved and used in the UK, such as the version of Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE or a vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca Plc and Oxford University. It does not matter whether the country is included in the “red list” of countries with additional entry restrictions or not.
“The UK position points to a colonial mindset that should be strongly condemned,” said Shabir Madi, a vaccination worker at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who led vaccine trials in South Africa with AstraZeneca and Novavax Inc.. “If they really believe that these vaccines are not perfect – which is not true – they have to provide evidence to support that,” he added.
(Featured photo: MTI/AP/Johnson & Johnson)
