American tourists who have been fully vaccinated will be able to visit the European Union by this summer, the head of the EU’s executive body said Sunday. “All 27 member states will accept unconditionally, all those who are vaccinated with vaccines approved by the [European Medical Agency],” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told The New York Times. (All vaccines being used in the U.S. have been approved.) The news comes after diplomats from some of the EU’s tourist destination countries argued that current metrics, which are based on COVID-19 case rates, are obsolete, considering the fast pace of vaccinations in the U.S. and other nations. Now discussions are ongoing about how to implement a vaccine passport program that would allow citizens to travel freely. Nonessential travel to the EU previously had only been allowed from a small number of countries with low numbers of cases of the coronavirus, such as South Korea and Australia.
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