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Covid Passport Measures: a tool to increase vaccination in countries with low immunization rates
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Like the boy in the story
The Emperor's New Clothes,
Reinhard Wallmann, Director General of Public Health of Cantabria, has said that the high contagiousness of
the omicron variant makes the Covid passport a measure that no longer makes sense
.
In this way, the requirement of the aforementioned instrument in this community has ceased to be in force.
According to Wallmann
, the objective of the Covid certificate has always been to reduce transmission and with this variant it cannot be avoided, so it is no longer effective.
But, has this really been its only purpose: "reducing transmission"?
Experts in epidemiology have also valued the capacity of this instrument as an incentive for vaccination.
Especially of the younger groups that were stopped at the doors of nightlife venues if they did not present the certificate, that is, basically, if they were not vaccinated.
But, even with this objective, the Covid passport would have lost effectiveness, according to the reasoning of several scientists.
However,
Cantabria's decision not to extend this instrument is not the majority decision
. The autonomous communities that before Christmas already received the endorsement to require this instrument mainly in nightlife and restaurants have not given up on extending it and bringing this requirement to the end of January. The exception is Extremadura, Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, which at no time in recent months have used the Covid passport.
"Scientific evidence tells us that the Covid passport has had very
little or no effectiveness in interrupting infections
, especially with the omicron variant," Jonay Ojeda, spokesman for the Spanish Society of Public Health and Health Administration, tells this newspaper ( Sespas), who insists on qualifying this measure as
more "gimmicky than effective"
.
Along the same lines, Ángela Domínguez, coordinator of the Working Group on Vaccination of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology (SEE), points out: "The epidemiological situation has been changing. At the moment, given the evidence that we are
also having that
in vaccinated the transmission of the virus occurs
, which, really, is something that we already knew, but that is more evident with the omicron variant, the Covid passport makes less sense ".
In short, Domínguez considers that, although the impact of this instrument remains to be quantified, the conclusion is clear: "We are facing a highly transmissible virus and, therefore,
the weight of the Covid passport is less than what it had before
".
Íñigo de Miguel Beriain, a European researcher and Doctor of Law, has been studying the use of the Covid passport or health passport since before the declaration of the pandemic and, at that time, he was one of its most fervent defenders.
However, the professor at the University of the Basque Country/EHU states that at this time
"the only use of the Covid passport is to protect the unvaccinated even against their will,
preventing them from accessing places where it is contagion more likely.
“At this point, it is not going to make those who have not already been vaccinated get vaccinated and it is not going to substantially reduce infections, because vaccines do not make transmission so difficult.”
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