Petros Giannakouris AP
The European Union on Monday announced a road map to allowing vaccinated people from outside the bloc to travel to Europe, foretelling a more normal and connected continent after more than a year in which its boulevards and beauty have been off-limits to most of the world.
The proposal, which could be in place by the end of June, will give hope to travelers from the United States and other countries with aggressive coronavirus vaccination programs who are eager to visit some of the globe’s most popular destinations.
The E.U. has been working for months to set up an internal system to ease travel restrictions within the 27-nation club and others that take part in its border-free travel zone. Monday’s announcement was intended to show how that system could be adapted for other countries.
Europe would grant fully vaccinated people and their children the chance to visit, regardless of the coronavirus outbreak levels in their countries. Non-vaccinated citizens of non-European countries would be allowed to visit as the health situation improves in their countries.
“We propose to allow entry to the E.U. for nonessential reasons,” said European Commission spokesman Adalbert Jahnz, “for all people who have received the last recommended dose of an E.U.-authorized vaccine.”
The bloc would at the same time create a mechanism to halt travel quickly from countries with new concerning variants of the coronavirus, in effect setting up a system that is far more open than now but could also snap shut if needed.
Some European countries, including Greece and Iceland, have already given the green light to U.S. travelers. But the vast majority remain closed to nonessential travel.
Since Europe’s system of border-free travel within its boundaries depends on cooperation among the countries, they have incentives to come up with a way to work together.
[Greece reopens to Americans. But paradise is still under curfew.]
The proposal is still subject to change, and will ultimately need the approval of E.U. member states in addition to the European Commission, the bureaucracy that wrote it.
But for now, it envisions that travelers who have official confirmation that they are fully vaccinated will be able to submit that proof to European authorities in exchange for entering. Travelers might still be subject to quarantines or other tests depending on the decision of their destination country, but they would not face the blanket ban that is currently in place.
The plan as currently designed would anoint winners and losers.
Vaccinated Chinese tourists — many of whom will have received Chinese-made vaccines that are not currently approved in Europe — wouldn’t receive special treatment, although they could still visit if China’s overall pandemic situation remained under control.
Israelis, many of whom are fully vaccinated, will get clearance. British travelers — who are among the most frequent visitors to the E.U. — could be in a sticky situation, since their leaders have decided to prioritize spreading a single dose of the vaccine among as many people as possible rather than focus on getting people fully vaccinated with double doses.
The European Commission said it was giving special consideration to vaccinations because of emerging scientific evidence that people who are vaccinated are not just personally protected from illness but are also drastically less likely to be asymptomatic carriers of the virus.
Europe’s internally-focused effort to ease travel restrictions among E.U. countries has put less emphasis on vaccinations, partly to avoid perceptions that the vaccine is being mandated. Instead, it would set up a secure system for travelers to prove either that they had been vaccinated, that they had a recent negative coronavirus test or that they had recovered from the disease itself, conferring immunity for at least some time.
A version of that system is expected to be running in the biggest E.U. countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain, by the end of May.
Europe’s effort to create vaccine certificates has focused on travel between nations. But already some individual countries, such as Denmark, have gone further and begun deploying vaccine passports that allow special access to shops, concerts and other semipublic spaces.
“We need a single certificate which is valid in all member states, which can get rid of this cacophony of different measures that prevent people from moving freely, that discourage people from mounting to move around the union,” said Juan Fernando López Aguilar, a Spanish member of European Parliament who is leading that body’s negotiations of the draft rules about covid-19 travel documents. Many policymakers shy away from calling them vaccine passports, since they don’t actually require that the bearers be vaccinated. The people working on them have dubbed them “green certificates” instead.
Drafters of the system have struggled to incorporate both security and privacy, since privacy advocates warn that a system that tracks people’s movements inside countries could violate rights. Some elements of vaccination passports, such as QR codes, have proven easy to forge, as The Washington Post found when it examined New York State’s version.
Birnbaum reported from Riga, Latvia. Quentin Ariès in Brussels contributed to this report.
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