Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, assured yesterday that the Government is willing to maintain its “regular dialogue” with the United Kingdom to get Spain out of the “amber zone” of the British traffic light of international mobility, “a sovereign decision of the United Kingdom that is not in line with what we had discussed so far”.
The British government announced last Friday a “green list” of twelve countries and territories to which travel will be facilitated from May 17. This list includes Portugal and Gibraltar, but excludes Spain, France and Greece, which appear in the “amber” classification. The list, which will be reviewed every three weeks, includes the countries en bloc and does not provide for any differentiated treatment by region, such as the Canary Islands or the Balearic Islands.
“Spain has been in dialogue with the United Kingdom for several months now in the preparation of its rules for the mobility of citizens from this May, and in our discussions so far we had talked about the possibility of the United Kingdom taking decisions disaggregated by regions, as it has been doing so far in the travel recommendations that it has been issuing regularly in recent months”, said the minister in Brussels during the press conference following the EU Foreign Affairs Council.
“It is true that, in this latest decision, the United Kingdom has decided not to make this regionalization in the mobility measures, for Spain or for any other third country, and it is true that it has limited itself exclusively to reflecting in its traffic light, red, amber, green, the epidemiological situation of each country“, she continued.
“Obviously, the United Kingdom has also announced that it will regularly review this traffic light, in a list in which countries will move down or up depending on the degree of incidence of the pandemic”, she recalled. Therefore, he warned, “it is very important that in Spain we are very responsible in following all the health recommendations to keep the advance of COVID at bay”, because “the more we stop the advance of COVID, the easier it will be for us to move into the green zone of the British table”, she added.
“This is a sovereign decision on the part of the UK that doesn’t go into the discussion of what we had discussed so far, but it is their sovereign decision”, she said. However, it is also “a decision that the UK will review regularly” and there is a “commitment on the part of the Spanish government to maintain this regular dialogue to highlight the efforts that are being made in much of Spain to keep COVID at bay”, she said.
In this regard, the Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, said yesterday in Alicante, during a breakfast-colloquium organized by the Club Información at the Casa Mediterráneo, that the Government of Boris Johnson will modify this classification (which requires British tourists from Spain to keep a ten-day quarantine) as the vaccinations in Spain progress and expressed, therefore, her confidence that “British tourists can travel in green in the coming weeks” and “spend their vacations in Spain this summer”.
AstraZeneca and vaccine patents
On the other hand, and in relation to the decision of Brussels to put an end to the agreement with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca as of June due to its repeated breach of the contract for the supply of vaccines, the minister assured that “Spain supports the efforts of the Commission to make joint purchases on behalf of the Member States and, obviously, it supports these efforts in all dimensions”, both in the extensions of the contracts and in the decision “not to do so with a company that has been unable to supply the EU under the agreed terms”.
Likewise, she assured that the Spanish health authorities are examining together with “all the autonomous communities” the response that will be given to “those citizens who have taken a first dose of AstraZeneca and are waiting for the second one”. “I don’t think they have anything to fear, a solution will be sought”, which will also include “the scientific community”, in order to “give citizens the maximum guarantee of safety”, she concluded.
González Laya also announced that Spain is going to present, at the next G20 Health Summit, organized by the Italian presidency of the G20 for May 21, the proposal that was raised in Oporto by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, during the recent EU Social Summit regarding vaccines, based on “four fundamental axes”: the “maximum use of all the flexibilities offered by the WTO rules on intellectual property”, including the possible lifting of patents; the improvement of latent production capacity in developing countries “in the short term” through “the transfer of technology by pharmaceutical companies”; the commitment – “which should be adopted by all countries participating in this G20 summit”- to “eliminate all restrictions on trade in vaccines and, more importantly, in inputs to manufacture these vaccines”, and the acceleration of “vaccine distribution, again capitalizing COVAX and also seeking a public-private partnership with airlines”.
