Viruses / Vaccines

Vaccine snob’ travelers head to Guam for sun, sea — and shots
By Lyric Li
September 03 at 5:00 AM ET
TUMON, Guam — Passport: check. Coronavirus test: negative. Temperature: normal.
Wearing an N95 mask and face shield, Jimmy Lin lugged his bag full of instant noodles and beachwear out of Guam’s modest airport one recent afternoon.
“It feels kind of surreal being here,” said the 37-year-old from Taiwan, who owns a ski resort in Japan that he hasn’t visited since early 2020 because of travel restrictions. “I used to travel abroad at least every other month, and then suddenly the world was closed on me.”
Like thousands of Asian tourists who have visited this American outpost in the Pacific since early this summer, Lin was in Guam to get his preferred coronavirus shots — Pfizer-BioNTech’s messenger-RNA doses — under a vaccine tourism initiative designed to offset pandemic losses.
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While an increasing number of tourism-reliant countries, such as Italy and Thailand, recognize vaccination records for travel, a vacation abroad remains off-limits for millions of the unvaccinated. Enter Guam, a U.S. territory with ample vaccine supplies and no quarantine restrictions, where more than 80 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. For residents of Taiwan, South Korea and elsewhere, three weeks on a tropical island plus the chance to get doubly dosed equal an opportunity they can’t always get at home because of supply shortages and access issues.
“I’m a vaccine snob,” said Lin, who got his first Pfizer shot on Aug. 3 through Guam’s government-sponsored “vacation and vaccination,” or AirV&V;, program, paying $100 for one dose. “Here in Guam I can choose the vaccine I want at an affordable price, but back in Taiwan, all I could do was wait for whatever is available, at who knows when.”
Around the world, tourism-dependent places have come up with creative ideas to try to jump-start business devastated by the pandemic. Some have sought to lure digital nomads or allowed visitors to quarantine in resorts. Others have tried travel bubbles that have collapsed when new outbreaks have flared.
And while Guam’s AirV&V; initiative can go only a small way to redeeming lost tourist dollars — more than 1.6 million international visitors graced these shores in 2019 — businesses say it’s worth a shot.

continues....

expect some preferred to wait for formal approval by fda.....

others I expect chose to just wait and see if some side effects came outside of the timeframe used for studies in getting the emergency use approval.