Grounded by bias

Context: EU’s vaccine travel pass is discriminatory, a barrier to trade in services.

Impact of pandemic on trade:

• Travel becomes an important medium for trade in services, especially where consumers or firms make use of a service in another country.
• There has been a decline of 42-47%  in the world’s total passengers in 2021 compared to 2019.
• Many countries like China and Israel have introduced vaccine certificates that ease the process of entering and travelling across the destination country for vaccinated travellers.
• The recent and the most contentious issue in this regard is the European Union’s “Green Pass” scheme.
• The EU has listed only four vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for the pass: Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty, Moderna’s Spikevax, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen.

Issues with the vaccine travel pass: 

• May act as a trade barrier: Though these certificates can be looked at from the lens of trade facilitation, they can potentially act as a trade barrier if they encourage discriminatory treatment.
• Discriminatory for the developed nations: Vaccine doses administered per 100 people is 1.4 for low-income countries as compared to 93.2 for high-income countries. This makes travellers from low-income countries ineligible to avail these certificates.
• Discrimination based on types of vaccines administered: As the Green Pass scheme includes only four selected vaccines approved by the EMA, it makes travellers from countries administering alternate vaccines ineligible for certification.
• For instance, travellers from India vaccinated with Covishield still need to quarantine in the Netherlands, as India is considered a high-risk country.
• As per estimates, WHO, countries not administering any of the EMA-approved vaccines account for at least 14%  of the vaccinated population.

Conclusion: With such discriminatory intervention, the EU policy does not go well with the globalisation policy of collective welfare.

• To achieve the desired goal, countries need to cooperate on vaccine production to accelerate the global vaccination process.
•  The Covid vaccine supply chain can involve more than 100 components, and it is important to strengthen the global supply chain. This makes lifting trade barriers on raw materials for vaccine production critical.