Access to COVID-19 vaccines has
long been recognized as a potential creator of disparities among countries,
communities, and people with disproportionate access to vaccines. Back in
April, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general
of the World Health Organization (
WHO), said that vaccine equity was the "challenge of our time".
اضافة اعلان
A new potential creator of
disparity comes in the form of blanket travel bans impacting residents of
certain countries. For example, a number of countries in the European Union have
imposed bans on residents of Jordan and other countries in the region, which do
not take into consideration the vaccination status of the traveler. Is the
denial of entry for a vaccinated individual holding a valid visa a new form of disparity
and discrimination? While nationality had previously been grounds to deny a visa
or entry into a country, denial based on a place of residency had largely been unheard
of prior to COVID-19.
From a legal perspective, it is well within the rights
of any country to deny a traveler’s entry into their borders, for whatever
reason, even for those holding valid visas. To those at the receiving end of
such policies however, it is difficult to accept travel bans largely because there
is no insight into the rationale behind such decisions.
At the onset of the COVID-19
crisis, countries rightly and understandably began placing blanket travel bans
on effected regions and countries in order to curtail the spread of the virus. Even
Jordanians stuck abroad were unable to exercise their constitutional right to
return home before repatriation flights came into effect.
These travel bans
subsided as countries gained vital knowledge about the virus and its treatment
and were able to ramp up their public health systems to deal with a surge in
the number of COVID-19 cases. Vaccine rollouts also undoubtedly helped ease the
situation as well. While major spikes or the discovery of new strains can still
elicit new travel bans, such as that of the Indian (Delta and Delta Plus) variant
and the subsequent travel ban on travelers from India, these are normally
temporary, and less common nowadays.
There are three possible explanations
for blanket travel bans, such as those currently imposed by a number of
European countries on residents of Jordan and other countries in the region.
Firstly, countries are rightly concerned with new strains of viruses that could
be resistant to existing vaccines and spread faster than others. This concern
becomes all the more understandable when considering the sheer magnitude of
travelers arriving at European borders; Europe is actually the global leader in
international tourism, with over 700 million inbound tourists annually.
Secondly, the governments of the countries
issuing the bans could have a low level of trust in the integrity of the
vaccination data provided by Jordan and other banned countries. This could stem from
concerns regarding the ease of falsifying vaccination records, and a general record
of corruption and/or transparency in those countries. Perhaps the language of
the vaccination certificate itself and its acceptance in non-Arabic speaking
countries could also play a part.
Lastly, it could simply be a
result of a calculus of interests, whereby countries that can exert greater political
pressure somehow survive the ban regardless of the status of the pandemic in
their country, while others don’t.
Jordanians find the reasoning
difficult to contend with. They have a long history of struggling with visas
and restrictions on their ease of movement internationally, especially after
9/11. This is all the more frustrating given Jordan’s record of welcoming
refugees and those fleeing regional conflict based on humanitarian principles. They
should find some consolation in the fact that these measures are temporary and
are gradually being lifted with countries such a France and Spain already exhibiting
excellent leadership by removing them. The remaining thing for Jordanian
travelers to worry about is whether European countries will accept vaccines
produced by China or Russia, and whether they were lucky enough to have received those produced by Western countries, but that is another issue altogether.
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