Constitutional clashes on the EU's green pass

Everything surronding Covid-19 has become politicized since many EU countries use the Digital Covid Certificate to grant or deny access to nightlife venues, restaurants, cafees, and other public spaces.  The vaccine passport has become a condition for every day life also in Italy, although most Italian people are still observing social distancing rules perfectly. Italian people are also wearing masks everywhere.

According to many researches, people who have been vaccinated or previously infected with the Covid-19 are able to catch and spread the virus. That's the main reason why last month Spain's Supreme Court ruled against using vaccine passport to restrict access to public spaces. It's the first judicial authority to do so in Europe, as using vaccine passport to prevent access to public spaces may not be useful to prevent the spreading of the infection. In this perspective, it seems that Italian policy makers still pretend to misunderstand the EU principles of effectiveness, necessity and proportionality.  

In many EU countries people who haven't a green pass are banned from public spaces, basic freedoms and services, although it is already clear that there is no difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated with regards to the Delta variant. In this context, it's easy to see that pharmaceutical and health product companies are spending billions on lobbying politicians around the world. At the moment, in Spain it is not the case. 

In Italy, the protests against the Covid health pass have now been going for 10 weeks.

Surplus vaccine doses

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear global inequality of our time, as only two percent of people who live in the African continent has been fully vaccinated.

According to Airinfinity Ltd, a science information company headquartered in London, western developed countries could have 1.2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses by the end of this year. As a matter of fact, surplus COVID-19 vaccine shots in US, UK, EU and Japan will not be shipped to poorer countries.

As said by the WTO spokeperson, Keith Rockwell, if we were to delocalise part of vaccine production in developing countries, more shots would go into arms in Africa and Andean countries. Not mention of Israeli data which shows vaccinated people are becoming ill with COVID-19, but that's another story. 

Neha

 

This week an Afghan eight-year-old girl, Neha, was very happy after she had landed at Melsbroek airport in Belgium. "I never want to return to Afghanistan", she said.

A picture of the Afghan girl jumping at the Belgian airport then went around the world. Her happiness symbolizes the hope and relief of many people who fled the taliban regime in Afghanistan 🇦🇫