The Department of Tourism says that it wants to introduce a vaccine passport for South Africa, but a number of international and legislative obstacles have to be overcome.
A lack of standardisation around vaccine passports worldwide is a key issue, said tourism director-general Nkhumeleni Victor Tharage in a briefing to Parliament on 17 August.
“Even in some jurisdictions that have opted to apply this (passport), there isn’t yet a sense of uniformity. When we don’t have a single, standardised specimen, it is a little bit difficult to say which one is which.
“If South Africa introduces (a passport), and there is access to information from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) that confirms that a person has been vaccinated, the question is if that person arrives Lagos (Nigeria), what resources will they use to verify this information that is stored on a database in South Africa?”
South Africa has the same problem when it comes to verification of incoming tourists, Tharage said. The government was also cautious about introducing a vaccine passport system that is discriminatory against certain groups of people, he noted.
“When we reopen, and when everyone is starting to travel, it should not be discriminatory. And that principle has been reiterated time and time again.”
The vaccine passport could be a requirement for events, and Tharage said he was confident that this is something that the government could introduce with ease on short notice.
“At the end of the day, it’s about being able to get the necessary confidence from consumers, tourists and trade. If we don’t do that, then there will be a negative impact on our recovery.”
However, Department of Health spokesperson Foster Mohale affirmed that South Africa has no immediate plans to require proof of vaccination for any purpose.
Open for tourism
Transport minister Fikile Mbalula has said that his department is working with businesses to ensure that South Africa successfully reopens for international travel. Presenting his departmental budget speech at the end of May, Mbalula said that South Africa must ensure that it joins the increasing number of countries which accept the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) mobile travel pass.
The travel pass is a mobile app that helps travellers store and manage their verified certifications for COVID tests or vaccines, and is more secure and efficient than current paper processes, IATA said. This is important given the potentially enormous scale of testing or vaccine verifications that the group must securely manage. IATA said it is looking to introduce further changes, such as QR code scanning by immigration officials.
Source: BusinessTech
