Bad news for any anti-vaxxing international artists you might hope to see in the future, as it looks like they might be required to vaccinate in order to board flights to Australia.
This idea has been put forward by QANTAS CEO Alan Joyce said to A Current Affair that his airline are considering implementing a policy that requires all international passengers to be vaccinated before boarding.
“We are looking at changing our terms and conditions to say, for international travellers, that we will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft,” he said.
It’s going to be a bit of a technological feat, with Joyce saying it would be judged via what he called a “vaccination passport”.
“What we are looking at is how you can have [a] vaccination passport, an electronic version of it, that certifies what the vaccine is, is it acceptable to the country you are travelling to,” he said.
“There’s a lot of logistics, a lot of technology that will be needed to be put in place to make this happen. But the airlines and the governments are working on this as we speak.”
“Whether you need that domestically,” he also said, “we will have to see what happens with COVID-19 in the market, but certainly, for international visitors coming out [to Australia] and people leaving the country, we think that is a necessity.”
Interestingly, Joyce theorised that the proof of vaccination could be “a common theme” throughout various airlines, which could potentially rule out international travel from artists without vaccinations across the board.
However, given the state of the pandemic in other countries outside of Australia, it seems like international tours are still a way off.
