Will International Tourism Get a Yellow Card? State of Play in the Age Covid-19

It’s a symbol of freedom, obliquely pictured on your Instagram; a document of adventures past, all those visas or titres de sejours, and the basic instrument of travel: the passport. Something at once vital to the highly connected and globalized world but still archaic, a paper book loaded with stamps even as so much of life renders itself online.

It’s doubtful that an App and bomb-proof encryption will replace the passport any time soon, but what about that quadruple folded length of yellow paper, the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis as approved by the World Health Organization?

Are vaccine Passports going to be the new reality of travel in the Age of Covid-19? Let’s look at the present, past and future:

Currently, the only disease that requires documented vaccination is Yellow Fever. And even then, it’s required for specific journeys. Usually, travelers coming from or going to at-risk countries along the Equator in Africa and South America. Like if you’re hitchhiking on sailboats from a place where there’s a risk of it, Panama, to one where there is not, French Polynesia. Most countries in North America and Europe have no Yellow Fever vaccination requirements at all.

Travel vaccinations have been the province of well-off-the-beaten-path tourism, people dead set on sailing to remote, scarcely inhabited islands or wanderers lighting out into the hinterlands where Japanese Encephalitis or Rabies carrying bats roam. In some ways, the yellow card is a rite of passage and a souvenir for the people who have had more than one near death experience out there.

Most countries have not grappled with a pandemic in a century. And even then, the public health options were largely the same: closed borders, quarantines, and mandatory mask-wearing. That it’s occurring in the age of jet travel and peak global commerce only complicates the already complicated issue.

It was in a similar tumult that the modern passport arrived.

The earliest passports were issued by Royal courts in Europe as credentials for emissaries traveling on official functions. An obvious task, but required in the, now unimaginable, era where everyone assumed people’s identity at their word.

For US Citizens, passports have been a form of identification issued variously by States and the Federal government well before they were required for international travel. It was only during and after World War I that passports became a standard of identification and a requirement for all international travel.

The short-lived League of Nations took up the issue of passports in 1920 and after several subsequent conferences, as is international custom, issued guidelines for passports. Until that point, passports might have been anything from a diploma-sized sheet of paper or one folded eight times and covered with cardboard.

The modern passport book is almost a millennial, created through the International Civil Aviation Organization in 1980. Despite many advances in technology, biometric chips were only added in the US in 2006 and became standard along with RFIDs in 2007. Now in the age of blockchain and QR, it would seem that another leap in verification is in the offing.

It’s been reported in the Washington Post that China “seeks to negotiate mutual recognition of vaccine passports with other nations.” That a traveler’s vaccination information would be submitted in an application for a “coronavirus QR health code”.

The EU Commission also announced that it is in talks with the US government to establish a vaccine verification regime for the coming summer holiday season. The only comparable regime, and likely starting point, is the limited and patchwork system that regulates the movement of persons to and from areas where Yellow Fever is endemic.

With experts warning that the current pandemic is not an anomaly but an eventuality, there is a powerful incentive to create a regime not necessarily for Covid-19 but for future and more deadly pandemics.

While for many, the idea of a government maintaining information on foreign visitors seems authoritarian and invasive, it should be noted that the US currently requires facial scans and fingerprints of all visitors. A quick scanning of your Yellow Book and a QR code for your troubles seems tame in comparison.

While many countries are currently open to US travelers, all require negative PCR Tests prior to arrival, mandatory follow-up testing, and often extensive quarantine periods. Many also require supplemental international health insurance. All regardless of vaccination status.

When I was down island this winter. Many cruisers, who expected to quarantine aboard their boats on anchor, were forced to book rooms at empty hotels and resorts designated as quarantine sites. They were also required to pay for multiple follow-up tests.

It might be anecdotal but everywhere I went in the islands, the lack of tourists was a constant lament. There may be a lot of optimism in the US about getting back to normal but it’s unlikely that countries will further relax their existing protocols until an updated vaccine regime is established. It’s been projected that global vaccination at current supplies and rates will not occur until early 2023.

Difficult or closed borders are here for the near future. Despite the economic imperatives, whether it needs of the international business community, transportation workers, or tourism, the challenge of a formal International Vaccine regime is great. It took a war, several international conferences, another war, and one last international conference to establish the modern passport.

The current system of Yellow Cards is the extant regime if Nation-States start requiring vaccination records. Translating the existing system into a digital form is the simplest and likeliest outcome. Of course, this assumes the current vaccines maintain their efficacy amidst all the mutations and variants.

With so many variables: vaccine availability and efficacy, national border status, tourist economy dependency, and the terrific inertia of any international agreement, sporadic outbreaks in the developed world and mounting evidence of fraudulent vaccination records will force countries to act.

Good thing they’re already in discussions. They always start early. Things take ages to negotiate and settle internationally, because when they do finally agree on something, it sticks around, kind of like passports.