Manifesting Your Passport to Vaccination Certification
The world is addressing the pandemic in one of two ways. In Asia, the strategy is elimination. In Europe and the US it is to accept that the virus is endemic and learn to live with it. The difference between the two comes down to the permeability of your national border. But the two are mutually exclusive. There can be no seamless, quarantine-less movement between the endemic and eliminated states. When there are unvaccinated people in a country with high incidences and less strict entry requirements, the opportunity for mutation grows. So in Europe and the US, it is a race between the vaccines and the variants, possibly forever.
The elimination states can control the virus like they control mumps; mandatory vaccination and then further clampdowns until there are no incidences of the virus to mutate from. Time is of the essence. The alternative is to treat the virus as we do influenza, with a need for regular top-ups as variants arise. If we take this approach, as the US and Europe have, they hope to save at least some part of this summer’s travel season. However, the risk of significant mutation is real, risking ruining many travel seasons to come.
Against that, it is true that the continuing loss of economic activity is risky too, albeit patchily. It is impacting travel and aviation much more significantly than many other sectors. Zoom appears to have delinked mobility from GDP. Nonetheless for countries such as Croatia, Greece and Spain that is not the case. Their need for a tourist season is being matched from countries like the UK that feel that a holiday in Croatia, Greece or Spain is a God-given right. And, the UK has a high vaccination rate, so Britons are feeling invincible.
That is a risky state of mind, if what is happening in Israel is any guide. Israel, with its world-leading rate of vaccinations insisted on a vaccine certificate for entry into hotels, bars, shops and so on, but within a week it was assumed that everyone had been vaccinated and the requirement was quietly ignored. In other words, it takes a week to go from herd immunity to herd mentality. That is fine for so long as there are no other strains or variants entering the country. That is why borders are so important to the public health effort. There are two ways to stop new variants from arriving. Total, rigid quarantine, or no travel at all.
Nonetheless, under huge pressure from the travel and tourism sector, and those that know that they need a dose of sunshine, the EU is taking the third of two options. It wants to issue certificates of vaccination – do not call it a passport, it is a Digital Green Certificate – so that the vaccinated can run carefree over the sand and into the surf this summer. That is fine as long as only the vaccinated are sharing the beach with you, and the hotel, and the restaurant and the aeroplane. It might be a huge boon for package tour operators if they are able to make that assurance. For the independent traveller, the certificates allow Europeans entrance to the largest Petri dish in history.
To the extent that the EU’s proposed Digital Green Certificates – that is a full house on someone’s Euro-speak bingo card – allows intra-European travel, it assumes we know what variants there are in Europe, that other variants will not get in and that there will be no nasty mutation around the vaccine. That seems increasingly optimistic. It also assumes that the vaccinated population will be sufficiently large to ease the pressure on the health system, allowing us to treat it as influenza after all. For the aviation business it means that long-haul travel will continue to be a challenge, but that short-haul travel can hope for a ray of light. That suits the low cost carriers down to the ground.
All of the airlines, long and short-haul, want travel to recommence. Of course they do. What is fascinating is how they are trying to make that happen. In the lockdown, the industrious took the opportunity to learn new skills – a musical instrument, painting or baking – or to attack their to-do list – re-reading War and Peace; repainting the cellar. Others got into yoga, mindfulness or meditation. The CEOs of Europe’s airlines, perhaps the CEOs of the world’s airlines, have clearly taken up Goal Visualisation. They intend manifesting a recovery by imagining it so hard that it happens.
Aristotle himself set the framework for goal visualisation, noting that you must first ‘have a definite, clear, practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends: wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end’. Once you have a goal, you can choose to be outcome focused or process focused. To be fair, a number of athletes and others do this as part of their preparation, and there seems to be some credibility to the claim that it might work.
There is no doubt that the CEOs have ticked the first box; they have a goal – to recommence ‘normal’ operations. They have visualised the process to make that happen, hence the Digital Green Certificate. It is certainly true that the potential travellers have a goal, as do the rest of the tourism industry and the airports. They are throwing their weight behind the goal visualisation efforts of the airlines and also demanding the Digital Green Certificate be manifested. The Commission and the European Parliament is obliging. It is the second one that is really tricky: wisdom, money, materials and methods. Where to start?
The European airline trade association, the A4E, held their normally-in-Brussels-one-time-only-by-Zoom press conference in mid-March. Air France’s Ben Smith handed the baton of leadership to easyJet’s Johan Lundgren, but not before joining in the manifestationfest with his airline CEO peers. Asked how he saw the future, he noted that airlines without a good business model were in trouble. Air France has no need to manifest a recovery; it has a good business plan. It goes and gets state aid at will.
It is important to remember that many of the potential passengers in that pent-up demand that has the airline CEOs salivating are sitting on vouchers from last year. When services recommence, the vouchers will come out, but the revenue will not come in. Airlines, such as easyJet, that have flirted with not further extending passenger vouchers are risking terrible treatment at the hands of the Commission and a punitive response. Most airlines have had to go into debt, or into their national treasury to survive. Once operations restart the cashflow situation will become critical. How many times can the airlines go back to the well of state aid? It is certainly true that at the moment it is impossible to imagine an application for state aid that would be rejected, but eventually, one has to assume, the line will be exceeded.
Europe has thrown its lot in with Team Vaccinate and Certificate. Alarming stories of China not allowing in visitors unless they have been vaccinated by the Chinese vaccine, and that the much-debated Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine cannot protect against the South African variant show just how fragile that strategy might be. The question is whether it is better to push hard now, or think hard about what a restructured, leaner and meaner industry might mean for a longer, better structured, recovery later. That would be worth manifesting.