WHO panel recommends against Covid immunization proof for int'l travel

The world health body stated its concerns amid a growing debate into blocking the entry of travellers if they are unvaccinated.

The independent experts said that vaccinations should not be the only condition to permit international travel, given limited global access and inequitable distribution of coronavirus vaccines.

WHO's emergency committee has also warned that new concerning variants of the virus were expected to spread around the world, making it even harder to halt the pandemic.

"The pandemic is nowhere near finished," the committee said in a statement, highlighting "the strong likelihood for the emergence and global spread of new and possibly more dangerous variants of concern that may be even more challenging to control".

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also asked China to co-operate better in the probe into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, the first cases of which were seen in Wuhan in December 2019,

"We hope there will be better co-operation to get to the bottom of what happened," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a regular press briefing in Geneva, calling in particular for access to raw data which so far has been inadequate.

Tedros said investigations into the origins of the pandemic in China were being hampered by the lack of raw data on the first days of its spread there.

Poorer countries with less access to vaccinations could face exclusion if such measures are put into place, some health experts have said.

The European Union earlier this month launched its digital COVID certificate system designed to help citizens travel more freely across the 27-nation bloc and open up summer tourism.