Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) does not support the use of “vaccine passports” to travel for equity reasons, an agency official said Tuesday.
Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO emergency program, said he was concerned that this requirement could exacerbate vaccine equity issues.
He told reporters that the WHO supports vaccine certificates as a way to provide a health record to vaccinated people, but the problem has a different consideration if certificates are used to attend work, school or to travel.
Ryan said that until more countries have equal access to vaccines, it would not be ethical to require vaccination tests to travel.
“We already have a big vaccine equity issue in the world. Imposing requirements for pre-trip vaccination certification could introduce another layer of this inequality,” Ryan said during a news conference. “If you do not have access to the vaccine in a country, you will be isolated as a country when vaccine passports are initiated.”
Ryan also noted that there are still persistent questions about whether vaccines can prevent coronavirus transmission.
He said the agencies ’working groups continue to discuss the issue and that the recommendation can be reviewed.
Ryan’s comments echoed those made by a WHO spokeswoman on Tuesday. According to Reuters, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris also said the agency does not support vaccine passports for travel.
“We, as WHO, say at this stage that we would not like to see the vaccination passport as an entry or exit requirement, because at this time we are not sure that the vaccine will prevent transmission,” he said. according to Reuters.
“There are all these other issues, apart from the issue of discrimination against people who can’t get the vaccine for one reason or another.”
The talk about vaccine passports in the United States has sparked a backlash among conservatives who have expressed concern about the possible extension of government that would discriminate against Americans who choose not to get vaccinated and violate their privacy rights.
The White House has maintained that it would postpone private companies if they wanted to implement some sort of vaccine passport system.