COVID travel update: Double jabbed from US and EU could avoid UK quarantine

pharmafile | July 30, 2021 | News story | Medical Communications  

UK ministers are close to deciding that double vaccinated people from the US and many EU countries will not have to quarantine if arriving in the UK.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said a decision would be taken shortly.

The Labour party has called these plans “reckless”, and could make the country vulnerable to more variants.

Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, told Sky News: “At the moment, everybody wants to go on holiday and get back to normal as quickly as possible, but this is reckless.

“We know that the Delta variant came into this country and delayed the lifting of some of the restrictions and caused infections here.

“We need to make sure that we’ve got proper data-driven analysis, and that we look at an international passport for vaccines.

“And we also know that people who have had the vaccine, of course, can still get the virus, so a testing regime is very important and crucial as well.”

This news comes alongside ‘vaccine tourists’ from around the world travelling to the US to get their jabs, with one woman paying $18,000 to vaccinate her family, as reported in BBC.

This is due to slower vaccination rates in certain countries driving people to the US to get their vaccines sooner.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab defended the potential move, “It’s a two-way process: you model the policy measures you’re taking based on the evidence and the advice that we get.

“We’re confident now that we’ve got something which is smart, sensible.

“As we’ve said − both domestically with our rollout but also internationally − we want to open up, we want to move the country forward, but we want to do it irreversibly.”

Lilly Subbotin

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