Tackling the challenge of recognising seafarer vaccinations

Speaking at Crew Connect Global Virtual Week, Andreas Nordseth, Director General of Danish Maritime Authority, said: “I think there’s no doubt I think that long period into 2022 we’ll see a lot of challenges.” Speakers on the Industry Leadership Panel highlighted the difficulties for seafarers in securing vaccinations, having different vaccines recognised, and still facing quarantine even once jabbed.

Stephen Cotton, General Secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) noted the industry was highly dependent a workforce that comes the Asian region such as the Indian sub-continent, Indonesia and the Philippines, which had been disadvantaged when it came to bidding a securing vaccines.

“So, we together with many of our colleagues on here have been in conversations with the World Health Organization about recognizing more than just the short list of vaccinations and looking for, standardized certification. It’s totally unacceptable the seafarer can have to have multiple jabs to make it to our shortlist.”

In particular Russian seafarers vaccinated in their home country have faced having to be vaccinated again to serve on vessels in other parts of the world. Nordseth said: “I think that the big challenge that we’re in for now is the recognition of vaccines certificates.

“Now, many places in the world we’re moving into third jabs, so there will be something about vaccines, international vaccine to get different kinds of jabs. And then we need to find a solution I would say in the early 2022, how can seafarers actually document that they are, sufficiently vaccinated.”