The European Union stands ready to open travel to more visitors after ambassadors approved changes to travel restrictions on Wednesday. This is where people walked out of the sea on the Italian volcanic island of Vulcano last week. Gianluca Chininea / AFP via Getty Images Hide caption
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Gianluca Chininea / AFP via Getty Images
The European Union stands ready to open travel to more visitors after ambassadors approved changes to travel restrictions on Wednesday. This is where people walked out of the sea on the Italian volcanic island of Vulcano last week.
Gianluca Chininea / AFP via Getty Images
The European Union stands ready to allow travelers from more countries to visit the block as long as they have been vaccinated with an approved vaccine to ease travel restrictions.
The new directive aims to enable EU member states to accept travelers from the US and other countries, although the EU has still made it clear which countries the directive applies to. EU ambassadors officially approved the new policy on Wednesday. It’s now to the European Council, an EU official told NPR. Formal acceptance is possible on Thursday.
The EU had previously allowed Travelers from a small group of countries. According to EU Commission spokesman Christian Wigand, the list is expected to expand if the EU changes its criteria for coronavirus transmission rates and other epidemiological data.
The change in travel rules was expected since at least last month, when Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, said she expected all EU members to expand their list of allowed travelers soon.
The main requirement for prospective travelers is that they must have received a vaccine approved by the European Medicines Agency – which has already approved the three vaccines used in the US that are manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
The EU especially omitted removed the US from their list of approved travel companions last summer, at a time when the many US states were seeing a huge surge in new coronavirus infections.
Almost all of Europe remains under one Level 4 “Do Not Travel” hint from the US State Department released in April more than 115 countries added to his heaviest name. The agency downgraded its UK recommendation last week to a Level 3 Reconsider Travel recommendation.
Travel restrictions and pandemic concerns have kept U.S. tourists away from a market that relies on raking in millions of dollars each year. In 2019 roughly 2 million or more Americans He was in Europe from May to September every month, according to the US National Travel & Tourism Office.
As they agreed to relax travel restrictions, the EU ambassadors also agreed to introduce a new emergency braking mechanism designed to limit the risk of new coronavirus variants in the EU. The new tool will “allow Member States to act quickly and in a coordinated manner,” said Wigand.
In another update on the EU’s attempts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, Von der Leyen said on Wednesday that the EU has now exceeded 200 million vaccinations.
The EU hopes to deliver enough vaccine doses by July to vaccinate 70% of the EU adult population – a goal that von der Leyen said is within reach.
