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IIf you are in the UK and have received the AstraZeneca vaccine, you may have been checking your batch number for the past few days to see if you belong to 5 million British Who received the vaccine version made in India. The new digital Covid certificate for this vaccine has not yet been approved by the European Commission. Live last week.
This certificate allows the vaccinated person to travel between 27 EU countries (and the four related European countries) without isolation or further testing.Therefore, the headline news of the weekend is about “travel ban“And Europe is a “forbidden zone” for some British tourists. However, British citizens are likely to be fine, and their travel to Europe will be unhindered: the Prime Minister himself stated that he is “confident” that travelers “will not have problems” This is just an “administrative barrier” that should be “straightened out”, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization in the United Kingdom tell British Broadcasting Corporation.
What’s not so much in the headlines is that millions of other potential travelers have been in this situation for longer and have not yet received any form of clarification or assurance. These are residents of many non-European countries in the world. They have been vaccinated with a vaccine made in India under the trademark Covishield, which is not included in the EU passport. Covishield has been approved World Health Organization It is described as the backbone of vaccination work across Africa and low- and middle-income countries.
Strangely, Covishield is only an Indian-produced version of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, so it is natural that people generally believe that it will receive the same recognition in terms of travel and health conditions. EU travelers living in countries/regions that distribute Covishield received conflicting information: on the one hand, the government assured them that the vaccines they received were safe and globally recognized; on the other hand, they were rejected by the EU embassy and they notified them via robots Their vaccination status may not be suitable for travel.
Last month, according to East African travellers I spoke to, the French Embassy in Nairobi informed potential travellers that “Although the Covishield vaccine is currently produced under the license of AstraZeneca, it has not been obtained by the European Medicines Agency. (EMA).) and France at present”. This news triggered accusations from the outside world that the European Union once again increased the barriers of the “European Fortress” to the rest of the world. Indian journalist Barkha Dutt called the vaccine neglected “Ugly racism“.
Now, a full-scale diplomatic crisis is unfolding.On the day when the EU Pass was launched without Covishield, India threatened to retaliate, government sources Tell BBC If the vaccine produced in India is not added to the EU travel pass, Delhi will “establish a reciprocal policy to recognize the EU digital Covid certificate”. The Indian media reported the story in language suggesting that national sovereignty was underestimated.
Ironically, the vast majority of Covishield vaccinations in low-income countries are only the result of global efforts, and the EU has already made efforts to this end. Commitment of £850 million, Called Covax, to fight the pandemic. Covax’s mission statement is to “ensure that people all over the world will receive the C-19 vaccine, regardless of their wealth.”
A lot of goodwill in this effort and trust in donor countries can be wasted because of the EU’s unequal treatment of vaccines that it had previously eager to market and fund.The African Union did not ignore this absurdity Joint Statement With the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, criticized the “unfair” treatment.They urged the EU to “consider increasing the [Covax] Vaccines considered suitable for global promotion.” In other words, if vaccines are safe and effective enough to be distributed by the European Union, then they are also safe and effective enough to be accepted by the European Union.
The optics are terrible. This incident touched all kinds of nerves, just like in the UK-there is no doubt that the malicious stereotype of the EU after Brexit will not help. For non-Western countries, the most provocative suggestion is that although AstraZeneca’s two vaccines are exactly the same, the vaccine produced in India must be inferior: this idea even contaminates part of the stocks distributed in the UK. The whole incident set a worrying precedent. After 18 months of a significant slowdown in economic activity, the establishment of a two-tier system that affects trade and business travel will severely weaken the recovery capacity of poorer countries—not to mention the labor costs of families scattered on all continents.
But apart from the headlines, it is not an overt prejudice, but a bureaucratic process that leads to de facto discrimination.According to EMA, Covishield is not included in the vaccine passport program because its manufacturer, the Serum Institute of India, has not yet applied for marketing authorization; but this would be a strange thing because the vaccine is not manufactured for sale and use in Europe (The institute has Apply for authorization). EMA stated that the Covishield license under AstraZeneca is not sufficient because manufacturing conditions vary from factory to factory, so all licensees must apply separately.
At present, the anger expressed by non-European countries seems to have worked to some extent.At last weekend Seven European Countries Separately approved Covishield. But the unexpected fact of this predictable anger shows that a complacent bureaucracy ignores the needs and perceptions of most parts of the world.
All this is a valuable lesson. In the early days of the pandemic, the challenge is to understand that we are all together and that very few people are safe until everyone is safe. Today, almost every scientist in the world is repeating this mantra.
But it has become increasingly clear that protective solidarity requires not only goodwill and resource sharing, but also the dismantling of protectionist infrastructure that is not suitable for purposes under the conditions of a rapidly mutating global virus. As millions of British citizens find themselves stuck in the error of the rigid system, and as the UK begins to consider its own post-vaccination travel rules and a full reopening to the world, this is a lesson we should pay close attention to.
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