On 17 September transport secretary Grant Shapps announced new international travel rules whose purpose is two-fold: firstly, to exclude people from the under-developed world from entering Britain, and secondly, to protect the interests of Big Pharma against China, Russia and in the near future, Cuba.
There will no longer be an amber list of countries – they will all either be red or non-red. From 4 October, travellers from the US, Europe and 25 other countries including Japan, Turkey, Pakistan, New Zealand and Australia will be on the non-red list and will have their vaccine certificates recognised. If fully vaccinated, they will not have to quarantine and will merely have to undertake a lateral flow test on entry into Britain. But the only vaccines on the approved list are those produced by Big Pharma – AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson and Johnson. China’s Sinovac, Russia’s Sputnik V and Cuba’s Soberana range of vaccines are not approved, so travellers from non-red countries who have had courses of such non-approved vaccines will be treated as if they are from a red list country and will have to isolate when they enter Britain.
Travellers from red list countries, which include most of Africa, Asia and Latin America, will be considered ‘not fully vaccinated’, and will be forced to quarantine on arrival at a cost per adult of £2,285 even if they can prove they have completed a course of one of the four approved vaccines. This includes India, which produces and uses AstraZeneca. Chile, where daily case rates per person are currently 5% of those in Britain, remains on the red list because it has used Sinovac to immunise 90% of its adult population.
There is no science backing the government’s policy: only racism, because it assumes that vaccination certificates from red-list countries will be fraudulent particularly if they show the person has had one of the approved vaccines, and protectionism, to maintain the global market for Big Pharma in the face of the challenges from China, Russia and Cuba.
Charles Chinweizu
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 284, October/November 2021
