Passport please.
Yes, but health passport.
This is what we are likely to hear at the borders with a horizon of “two or three months”.
The European Commissioner in charge of vaccines, Thierry Breton, stressed this Sunday that the health passport would be available throughout the Union by the beginning of the summer, in digital or paper version.
The former French Minister of the Economy took the opportunity to detail the contours of this sesame to travel in the Old Continent.
A QR code
"You will find your name, your date of birth, the number of your certified passport with the QR code,
the fact that you have been vaccinated or not, the type of vaccine and whether you have been a carrier of the disease ”, specified the European Commissioner, document in hand.
For the others, who would have had neither the vaccine nor the disease, a simple PCR test will be requested by the authorities.
To support the speech on the passport, the European Commissioner has also predicted an "exit from the tunnel" close.
"We have the capacity to produce and deliver for our fellow Europeans the 360 million doses planned for the end of the second quarter and the 420 million that are needed (...) to start talking about this collective immunity and achieve it “Mid-July, added Thierry Breton.
He had already argued last week that Europe could achieve collective immunity on July 14.
"A roundabout way of making vaccination compulsory"
If the European authorities push this model, which has proven itself in Israel, the idea of the "health certificate" is still struggling to gain ground among some scientists.
Stéphane Gayet, hygienic infectious disease specialist at Strasbourg University Hospital, considers that the health certificate is "a roundabout way of making vaccination compulsory, and of preparing people's minds for restrictions on freedom of movement".
But for him, this is not a good idea, because of the appearance of variants which raise fears of a limited effectiveness of vaccines and cases of rapid reinfection.
“From my point of view, the way out of this health crisis lies more in treatments to limit serious cases,” he explains.
Martin Blachier, epidemiologist and public health specialist, fully approves the idea of "a certificate which shows that you have little risk of being contaminated or contaminating".
“It's a way to get back to life more quickly, a kind of bridge between the current situation and the moment when the entire population will be vaccinated.
However, like Stéphane Gayet, he recalls that vaccination or the fact of having already had the Covid is not an absolute guarantee that we do not present a risk.
And just like his colleague, he recalls the existence of cases of recontamination, in particular with Brazilian and South African variants.
Anyway, this health certificate will be
available in the language of each country and to be found in France, on the website of the Ministry of Health.
