From next Friday, vaccination certificates without a booster are no longer unlimited, but are valid for nine months as a corona admission ticket. According to “a rough estimate” by the Ministry of Health, half a million people could lose their green tick. Four questions.
1 What will change on Friday?
Then the corona admission ticket will expire for everyone who has not yet had a booster vaccination and whose first vaccination series was more than 270 days (nine months) ago. According to rough estimates by the Ministry of Health, 540,000 people will be without a ticket. They are those who now have a corona pass based on a vaccination certificate. It is therefore not about people who have not yet obtained a booster due to a recent infection.
In addition, the validity of a recovery certificate will be shortened on Friday. A positive corona test will soon be valid as a corona admission ticket for 180 days, provided the result has been confirmed by the GGD. That was a year.
A negative test certificate is still valid for 24 hours. 13 to 18-year-olds do not have to worry for the time being: their first vaccination series is still valid indefinitely, pending advice from the Health Council on whether this age group should also be offered a booster.
2 Why are those terms changing now?
The corona ticket must prevent infections behind the door – from a cafe, cinema or football stadium – as much as possible, but that is not possible if too many people carry the virus and can become infected. In recent months, the nature of the corona pandemic in the Netherlands has changed. The protection of the vaccines decreased and they appeared to protect less well against the Omikron variant. The number of reinfections rose from about 3 percent, when the Delta variant was dominant, to 13 percent in the first week of January. The booster shot restores that protection.
The question of how many days after the first vaccination series should also a booster be mandatory for a corona admission ticket is difficult to answer, Minister Ernst Kuipers (Public Health, D66) wrote in answer to parliamentary questions. “It is not possible to provide a scientific basis for an exact validity period, but the longer the primary vaccination series has been going on, the lower the effectiveness.” The Netherlands therefore joined – and to avoid confusion among citizens – with agreements regarding the European corona certificate. At the end of last year, the European Commission decided to shorten the validity of vaccination and recovery certificates. Those agreements came into effect on February 1.
The shorter validity will also encourage more people to take the booster. The booster level remains at 58.8 percent of Dutch adults, while everyone could get a booster shot. Although many people have also been infected in recent months, who have therefore not yet obtained a booster.
3 How long is the corona ticket valid after a booster?
According to the Ministry of Health, the protection of the booster will also decrease over time, but no agreements have yet been made about the validity of a booster shot because too little is known about it. According to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), repeated boosting is not a sustainable way to fight the corona virus. According to the EMA, this can lead to needlestick fatigue and an overstimulated immune system. It also needs to be investigated whether it would not make more sense to adapt the current boosters to the Omikron variant.
4 What does the government plan to do with 2G?
While the validity of the corona pass is being shortened, political support for the corona admission ticket is crumbling in the Netherlands. Countries such as Denmark have already abolished the corona pass and it is no longer mandatory in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday, Minister Kuipers asked the House of Representatives to postpone the consideration of the 2G bills – access only with a vaccine or proof of recovery. As with the first postponement in December, there is still too much doubt in parliament. All the more so because a TU Delft study recently concluded that the effect of a 2G or 3G policy during an Omikron wave would be ‘very limited’.
Read more about the latest developments around 2G: Kuipers wants more research – introduction of 2G off the track for the time being
Kuipers acknowledged that the research shows that in “the current epidemiological situation the difference between the effectiveness of 2G and 3G is so small” that 2G does not need to be introduced now. However, the minister does not want to write off the corona pass and investigate where 2G can be used “proportionally”.