The Americans Are Coming! Vaccinated US Tourists Will Be Able To Visit Spain This Summer

The Americans Are Coming! Vaccinated US Tourists Will Be Able To Visit Spain This Summer.

GET the Budweisers and burgers ready as Americans that have received all their vaccinations will be allowed to visit Europe this summer and of course, that includes Spain – which has always been a very popular destination for them.

This is already being seen as a major boost to the tourist sector, together with the green digital passes rollout in June, it now looks likely this summer will not be a washout after all.

American tourists vaccinated against Covid-19 will be able to travel to European Union countries this summer, said the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in an interview with The New York Times newspaper.

“Americans, as far as I know, use vaccines that are approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). This will allow them to travel and move freely,” said the President.

Von der Leyen added: “Because one thing is clear: the 27 member states will accept, unconditionally, all those who are vaccinated with vaccines approved by the EMA.” The EMA has approved the vaccines developed by the pharmaceutical companies Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech, and more recently after some scares, Johnson & Johnson, which are the three that are being administered in the United States.

Ms von der Leyen did not offer a timeline on when exactly tourist travel might open up or details on how it would occur. But her comments are a top-level statement that the current travel restrictions are set to change on the basis of vaccination certificates.

She noted that the United States was “on track” and making “huge progress” with its campaign to reach so-called herd immunity, or the vaccination of 70 percent of adults, by mid-June.

She added that resumption of travel would depend “on the epidemiological situation, but the situation is improving in the United States, as it is, hopefully, also improving in the European Union.”

Diplomats from Europe’s tourist destination countries, mostly led by Greece, have argued for weeks that the bloc’s criteria for determining whether a country is a “safe” origin purely based on low cases of Covid-19 are fast becoming irrelevant given the progress of vaccination campaigns in the United States, Britain, and some other countries.

Source:  20 minutes