July 7th - The Word of Committees
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2021
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New vaccination trials at Heathrow. What’s happening – and what isn’t?
Face masks on the Tube could continue.
And MPs demand action to win back the confidence – and business – of rail passengers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, it's Wednesday the 7th of July and thanks for joining me for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the Independent. |
| 0:10.1 | Today, new vaccination trials at Heathrow, what's happening and what isn't. |
| 0:16.3 | Face masks on the tube could continue and MPs demand action to win back the confidence and the |
| 0:24.4 | business of rail passengers. Of course, this podcast is completely free, as is my weekly travel email, |
| 0:31.8 | and you can sign up for that at independent.com.com.com.com.com slash newsletters. You may have woken up as I did today to find that new |
| 0:43.6 | vaccination trials are taking place at Heathrow Airport. The background to this is that British |
| 0:50.4 | Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Heathrow itself are teaming up to prove that it would be |
| 0:57.4 | possible to check people's vaccination status before they travel to the UK. Later this week, |
| 1:04.8 | they will begin a trial involving only passengers from Athens, Montego Bay, New York, JFK and Los Angeles. |
| 1:13.6 | And what will happen is that you, if you are flying from one of those locations on one of those airlines, |
| 1:20.2 | be invited to prove your vaccination status before you board the plane. |
| 1:25.8 | Then that gets transmitted to London Heathrow, |
| 1:30.1 | whereupon you get into a slightly faster queue. |
| 1:33.8 | Yes, unfortunately there is no tangible benefit |
| 1:36.6 | beyond possibly getting to the front of the queue |
| 1:39.5 | a little quicker, |
| 1:41.4 | at which point you will face exactly the same problems as people do at the |
| 1:45.7 | moment coming from those Amber List destinations. That involves 10 days of self-isolation |
| 1:51.5 | and multiple testing at considerable expense. So what's the point of it? Well, yes, I mean, |
| 1:59.5 | it's as though they were saying, if you can prove that your star sign is Capricorn, then we are going to let you jump the queue for passport control. Not a huge benefit. But the idea is they think it's going to be a proof of concept and that they will be able to show the UK government that it is possible |
| 2:19.2 | to introduce such a system. And of course, meanwhile, we are getting multiple leaks from |
| 2:25.0 | government saying that actually such a system is going to be introduced, allowing people |
... |
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