Covid-19 vaccinations should not be required for international travel
Covid-19 vaccinations should not be required for international travel, the UN civil aviation agency said Friday as part of updated pandemic guidelines for the air transportation sector.
The International Civil Aviation Organization Council's Aviation Recovery Task Force (CART) issued six new and two amended recommendations to member states aimed, after a dismal year, at "restoring public confidence in air travel and getting passengers to fly again."
"After a 70 percent decrease in air traffic, international air transport can now see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks (in part) to these new recommendations and guidelines," said ICAO Council president Salvatore Sciacchitano.
"The Council," he said, "has also taken into account the latest position of the WHO, which specifies that proof of Covid-19 vaccination should not be made a condition for international travel."
The virus and severe travel restrictions imposed to fight its spread effectively grounded many commercial aircraft over the past year.
But the gradual rollout of vast vaccine campaigns has given hope for a return to normalcy.
Earlier this month China launched a system of "virus passports" -- or certificates of vaccination -- to try to kickstart international travel.
It was hailed as the world's first virus passport -- similar schemes are also under discussion in the United States and the EU -- but is not mandatory.
"At such time as evidence shows that vaccinated persons would not transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus or would present a reduced risk of transmitting the virus, member states may exempt such individuals from testing and/or quarantine measures in accordance with a state's accepted risk threshold (and) the Covid-19 situation," the ICAO said.
But it added, "vaccination should not be a prerequisite for international travel."
CART also urged vaccinating air crews as soon as possible, and the temporary lifting of restrictions to air cargo operations to facilitate the transportation of essential goods, supplies and Covid-19 vaccines.
Based in Montreal, the ICAO Council, meanwhile, said it would convene a high-level meeting in October "to muster the political will of states and obtain commitment towards a full recovery of international air transport."
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.