Will You Need the COVID-19 Vaccine to Travel?

Israel announced last month that it will be issuing a “green passport” to residents who have received the COVID-19 vaccine, allowing them to avoid certain restrictions and offering clearance to travel internationally without being tested for COVID-19 first. It did not indicate whether it would require people from other countries to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination in order to visit Israel.

Asked whether a similar kind of vaccine passport might be issued in the U.S., Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Newsweek recently, “Anything is on the table. Anything is possible, of course.”

There is even a chance that individual states could require visitors to be vaccinated for COVID-19, in the same way they require public school students to show proof of vaccinations for certain diseases, like polio and hepatitis A, says Anthony Harris, M.D., medical director at WorkCare, a consulting company focused on health in the workplace (including airlines and cruise ships). Harris considers it “likely, even though it’s going to be a state-by-state process, that states will elect to mandate vaccinations and proving a record of vaccinations.”

What about cruising?

Cruises have been on hold in the U.S. since the onboard outbreaks last spring, and the big lines, like Carnival and Holland America, don’t plan on restarting until at least April. The CDC wants them to first prove they have effective safety protocols in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In the meantime, some cruise lines are considering whether they can require passengers to offer proof of vaccination, though none has made a decision yet. “Everything’s just fluid right now,” says Michelle Fee, CEO and founder of Cruise Planners, a travel agency network.

A big factor will be whether countries the cruise lines visit require travelers to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, Fee adds. “If they want to stop in certain ports of call, some of those countries might require it.”

“Lawyers are looking at it as we speak,” the CEO of Norwegian Cruise Lines Holdings told Travel Weekly recently of a possible COVID-19 vaccine requirement for passengers. “It will certainly be a requirement for the crew.”

Once you’re vaccinated, can you travel just like you did pre-COVID-19?

No, no and no, experts say. At least not for a while. The U.S. is still in a crisis stage, as the numbers of COVID-19 cases and related deaths continue to rise. And while the current COVID-19 vaccines (from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) are extremely effective at preventing illness in the people who receive them, vaccinated people might still be able to transmit the coronavirus to others as asymptomatic carriers — the jury’s still out on that at this early point in the rollout.

It’s also unclear how long immunity lasts after the two-dose vaccination.

For those reasons, even vaccinated people will need to follow mask wearing and safe social distancing recommendations, at least “until we reach the herd immunity magic number, which is around 196 million individuals” in the U.S., says WorkCare’s Harris.

Another reason we’ll want everyone to keep wearing masks and take other precautions for the near future, adds Harris: “We don’t want a subsegment of the population walking around without masks in a setting that requires masks to be worn. That’s just such an awkward precedent for the remainder of individuals who don’t have access to vaccinations at this point in time.”

Older people — wisely, health experts say — are likely to remain especially cautious about travel during the pandemic, even after they are vaccinated. In a December Yahoo Finance-Harris Poll of 277 people ages 55 and up, only a handful said they’d travel out of state a month after they were vaccinated for COVID-19, and just 15 percent said they’d do so one to three months afterward. That’s compared to 25 percent of people ages 18 to 34 who said they planned to travel during those first few months.