A spokesman for the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday (April 6) that WHO does not support requiring people to show their “vaccine passports” when traveling because there is uncertainty about whether vaccination can prevent the spread of the virus. There are also many other concerns.
“At this stage we do not want to make ‘vaccine passports’ a requirement for entry and exit because we are not sure at this stage whether the vaccine will prevent (the virus) from spreading.” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said.
Harris told a U.N. news conference that the vaccine passport discriminates against people who for some reason cannot be vaccinated. In addition, there are other problems with the vaccine passport.
Some people have expressed concerns about the vaccine passport.
In a recent interview on NTDTV’s “The Nation Speaks,” Dr. Sarah Chan, a bioethics expert at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Medicine, said, “I think that technically, the ‘vaccine passport’ is a kind of a vaccine passport. I think ‘vaccine passports’ are a solution that would be disproportionately burdensome and they would probably be a waste of resources. And on top of that, I think there are serious ethical issues with it. It’s an unnecessary way to divide (society). It will create more inequity and inequality in an already unequal society.”
She added, “If we start deciding who is free to participate in society based on vaccination status, we’re really working hard to put the onus on individuals to have to be vaccinated. And that in turn assumes that whether a person is vaccinated or not is entirely a matter of their own right to freely choose. But that is not the case. In fact, vaccination will depend on many other factors that are beyond people’s control, such as the ability to obtain the vaccine, pre-existing health conditions, and so on.”
WHO now expects to review the COVID-19 vaccine from China National Pharmaceutical Corporation and Kexing Biologicals around the end of April to determine whether it is available for potential emergency use, said Harris, a WHO spokeswoman.
She said that didn’t come as quickly as expected “because we need more data.” She declined to provide more information.
Many have expressed concern about the lack of transparency in clinical trials of the Chinese-made vaccine.
Polish President Andrzej Duda had talked to his Chinese counterpart about buying Chinese vaccines to speed up vaccinations. But a few days later Polish Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said he was not recommending Sinopharm’s vaccine at this time because of a lack of data and information.
Recent Comments