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The health secretary, Matt Hancock, has rejected the possibility that travellers who have been vaccinated in the UK and are returning to home should be able to swerve the onerous testing requirements.
At the Downing Street briefing he was asked by Janet from Liverpool when vaccinated travellers could expect to be excused from the requirement to take a pre-departure and post-arrival test.
Mr Hancock declined to answer directly. He said: “We do want to make sure there is a route to safe international travel in the future. But at the moment it is the red, amber and green approach that guides us.”
For the past 10 days international leisure travel has been permitted but with strict testing rules.
From the very limited number of “green list” destinations, including Portugal, Gibraltar and Iceland, returning holidaymakers must get a pre-departure test certified in English, French or Spanish, and pre-book a PCR test – typically adding £100 to the cost of a trip.
Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, said at the same event: “We do have to be really, really vigilant.
“Testing for travellers coming to the country is so important, and the genomic work that we now do, because we are not only assessing the risk for UK residents, and continuously searching for new variants, but we’re actually helping the rest of the world understand where those variants are at the moment.”
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