Why do travel organisers still require "full immunisation"?

Question

In the EU, a set of three Covid vaccinations was titled "full immunisation" in 2021 which is tantamount to "complete protection" from Covid. Meanwhile it has turned out that the triple vaccination does not offer this complete protection but only a reduced probability. Why do travel organisers still require "full immunisation" which is neither linguistically inaccurate nor based on scientific evidence?

Answer 1

In the EU, a set of three Covid vaccinations was titled "full immunisation" in 2021 which is tantamount to "complete protection" from Covid.

Full immunization does not mean complete protection. It merely means that one has been immunized to the full extent expected by the medical community. No vaccine is perfect, and vaccines do have side effects. As an extreme example, consider a person who somehow has received ten Covid-19 vaccinations (BTW, no doctor would do this) and wants still more. Those ten vaccinations would still leave that person somewhat susceptible to the disease. Each subsequent vaccination would help less but would exacerbate the chances of severe side effects.

How many vaccinations are needed and how often they're needed is a trade-off between the likelihood of bad side effects, the likelihood of enhanced protection, how long the immunization lasts, and the presence of the disease. For example, people in many countries are no longer immunized against smallpox because the disease has been wiped out in those countries and because the vaccines themselves can cause smallpox.

Answer 2

Because there is an opinion that vaccines still provide partial protection and that much is based on scientific evidence. There were efficiency trials for all Covid vaccines recommended for the wide use. There is some statistics available that shows them still reducing chances of infection, or reducing lethality if the infection does happen. Decision makers do not think these trials and stats are just all fake, even if some antivaxxers very obviously do. A vaccine does not need to be 100% effective to make sense.

Answer 3

Countries protect their own people. If you are fully vaccinated, you are less likely to spread Covid even if you are currently positive. So it makes sense to request incoming travellers to be fully vaccinated.

This doesn't apply if you are leaving your country, but of course in that case you must go into some new country, and they are going to request that incoming travellers be fully vaccinated. Therefore the travel organizer in your country will still ask you to be fully vaccinated.

Answer 4

Most likely answer? Regulatory inertia.

Initially there was lot's of hope that vaccinated people would be rather unlikely to spread the virus. The science was settled. (ie. initial studies which were only looking for very short time frame and only for variant really close to the original one were kind of showing that it works as supposed) Later, when the vaccines were clearly loosing effectiveness the idea was to give people booster or to increase number of vaccinated (including clearly low risk ones or the one who already had antibodies from infection).

To cancel those regulations, would mean:

• making a complete u-turn on policy which makes politicians look bad
• risk being considered as careless in case lifting restrictions just before another wave comes, which theoretically can be a more serious

So it's better (from political standpoint) to kick can down the road, with high enough share of vaccinated the policy is no longer big problem and cancel it a bit later, when no one would be remembering it or be too serious about trying to enforce it.

Do we have any flu passport, even though it would be beneficial to have increased immunization against this disease? Nope, even though from purely medical standpoint it could be easier sell as flu vaccines have lower side effects. There wasn't any specially deadly pandemic recently, so this idea gains no traction. However, as there was COVID-19 pandemic, then it's still being treated much more seriously.