Philip Geogiadis — Financial Times Nov 23, 2020
Qantas plans to insist that passengers on international flights have been vaccinated against Covid-19 before boarding its planes once any jab is rolled out.
Alan Joyce, the Australian airline’s chief executive, said he thought a vaccine would become “a necessity” for international travel. “
We are looking at changing our terms and conditions to say for international travellers, we will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft,” Mr Joyce told Channel 9 in Australia.
“I think that’s going to be a common thing talking to my colleagues in other airlines around the globe,” he added.
Qantas is the first major airline to publicly raise the possibility of refusing travel to passengers who have not been vaccinated.
The pandemic prompted Australia to close its borders to non-residents, and Qantas has suspended all international flights except for a skeleton schedule to New Zealand.
The company does not expect to reopen most of them until the middle of next year. Vaccine breakthroughs in the past two weeks have raised hopes that international travel could start to recover in 2021 but they have also provoked questions about how the health status of would-be passengers will be verified.
On Monday Oxford university and AstraZeneca became the third team of vaccine developers to announce their jab had been shown to be effective in late-stage trials.
David Powell, medical adviser to airline industry body Iata, said it was “a really strong possibility” that countries would start to demand proof of health status from travellers, particularly in areas with low prevalence of the virus such as Australia.
“Being able to have verifiable information about the health status of passengers, I think that is going to be critical,” he told reporters on Monday.
Tony Douglas, Etihad chief executive, told the Financial Times in September that health visas certifying that passengers were safe to fly could help the airline industry recover from the crisis.
Several digital health passes have since been developed, including World Economic Forum-backed CommonPass, which uses a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone and has held test runs to and from major hubs including New York, London and Singapore.
Iata on Monday announced it was developing a health pass with British Airways owner IAG.
But given the airline industry is not expecting a vaccine to be readily available until the middle of next year, executives see airport testing as a first step to restarting travel before any jab is rolled out to a critical mass of the population.
Airlines for Europe, a lobby group, said that while it was “very likely” that international standards would be needed on certifying vaccinations, the industry “can’t afford to wait that long”.
“At this stage, our main priority is the adoption of a common testing protocol and the recognition of test standards and measures for travel both in Europe and across the globe,” it said.
IAG, Virgin Atlantic and easyJet declined to comment on whether they would also demand passengers prove they have been vaccinated before travel. Ryanair did not respond to a request for comment.
It appears Alan Joyce doesn’t want his business to survive. I also hold the view that Australia is pursuing an isolationist policy, certainly as far as restrictive sheeple movement. This ties in with some of the most draconian lockdowns seen on prison Earth.
The loss of airlines and airports is no great loss. Both are incredibly complex to run and resource-intensive, and for all of this, profits are very low. The greens are, any party of your choice, wants aviation fuel to be taxed like other fuels. I an suggesting that all air travel will go, but I am suggesting we will see a return to 1950s access, so that means most sheeple can’t fly.
Alan Joyce also fails to grasp that many business people, especially those at the top, will not have vaccines and it is the same for the rich… both of which are clamoring to use private charter planes.
My personal reading is that there simply aren’t long queues of wealthy Americans or Europeans who have Australia on their top ten list. Maybe Joyce knows this & has accepted his financially precarious business will just shrink to a fraction of its 2019 size.
It’s a good thing I determined to never fly again after the gestapo made my @70 some mother remove her sandals almost 20 years ago.
Here I thought the BS couldn’t get any worse… I was wrong!
After taking the snakes vaccine I doubt there will be anyone well enough to travel so it looks like the airlines are gonna take a dive.
Have always thought aviation fuel should’ve taxed.. to be able to travel across Europe for a pittance. Each person burning enough fuel to heat a small house for a year , yet so many people living in fuel poverty unable to heat their homes..
It still wouldn’t make travel prohibitive.. so stop taxing home heating and reduce it to aviation fuel price..
This has been on the cards since Club of Rome discussions in the 1960s.
What I don’t understand is why ‘they’ allowed the boom in low-cost airlines in the past 20 years. Was it just to pull the rug from under us with a vengeance?… Every 25-year-old I know has been to 100 or 140 countries. Then suddenly, it’s no travel at all.
Joyce is a sodomite, he travels with his ‘husband’ at the expense of shareholders. It was once a national airline until the tories sold it off to private interests, and then offered shares to the sheeple so they could ‘own’ part of a company, a company they once had ownership of by being a citizen!
A massive scam privatisation is.
Sodomites seem to thrive in such an environment.