The European Commission has proposed that the European COVID certificate allowing Europeans to travel without restrictions if they are vaccinated expire nine months after receiving the complete guideline, unless it has been administered the booster dose, which would extend its validity indefinitely.
Brussels makes this recommendation by appealing to the member states to agree to coordinate in order to avoid new chaos in the management of the pandemic and to be able to adapt the control instruments that exist to the “volatile situation” of the advance of the coronavirus in member states and differences in their vaccination rates.
The Community Executive has taken into account the report released on Wednesday by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC, for its acronym in English) that estimates the maximum protection period of the vaccine at six months.
To this period, the Commission has decided to add three more months so that the Member States have sufficient margin to organize the campaigns to administer the booster doses to the population, as reported at a press conference in Brussels by the Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders.
Indeed, this Wednesday the ECDC urged the countries to administer the booster dose to people over 40 years of age, the elderly and vulnerable people. In addition, it put on the table the possibility of extending it to all adults over 18 years of age at least six months after full immunization.
In Spain, for the moment, this third booster is only considered for immunocompromised people, health and social health workers and people over 60 years of age. Although, in other countries such as France they have already extended the third injection for the entire population over 18 years of age. In addition, the German Permanent Commission for Vaccination has recommended the reinforcement for the entire population in view of the epidemiological situation they are facing. For its part, Portugal wants to vaccinate people over 65 and those over 50 who were immunized with Janssen in the next two months.
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