Qantas airline says vaccines mandatory for flights

Qantas has launched its own vaccination policy programme for the safety of passengers.

CAPE TOWN, March 23 (ANA) – As a business, Qantas has been looking for ways to improve foreign travellers’ safety during the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing new regulations.

Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas, has said that the airline should follow its own vaccination policy programme.

“We have a duty of care for our passengers and our crew, to say that everybody in that aircraft needs to be safe,” CEO of Qantas, Alan Joyce, said according to the BBC.

For the first time since Covid-19 infections soared in Melbourne, and the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) reopened its border with Victoria in November 2020.

At the time, Joyce said Qantas operating conditions were the worst in its 100-year history and that “the effect of Covid-19 on all airlines is obvious – it’s devastating.”

The aviation industry has been hit hard with the economic effects of Covid-19.

Flights between the the state capital of New South Wales and Sydney, had been cancelled, which is usually one of the busiest routes in the country.

“We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft… for international visitors coming out and people leaving the country, we think that’s a necessity,” Joyce told the BBC.

However, the Director of Digital health and Innovation from the World Health Organisation, Bernardo Mariano, disagrees. “We don’t approve the fact that a vaccinations passport should be a condition for travel,” he said to the BBC.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported that it funds $1.8 US trillion in global economic activity.

There have been approximately 900 fatalities as a result of Covid-19 in Australia, and about 28,000 people have been infected in total.

Airlines also limited flexibility, and have been forced to store a large number of aircraft, which amounted to roughly two-thirds of Qantas’ 314 planes.

Government controls and worries about contracting the coronavirus have resulted in a historic decrease in passenger numbers in an industry that transported 4.5 billion people in 2019.

Coronavirus vaccines are seen as critical to reviving an industry that saw a 75.6 per cent drop in global passenger numbers last year.

African News Agency (ANA); Editing by Naomi Mackay