#England will allow fully vaccinated visitors from the European Union and United States to arrive without needing to #quarantine from next week, in a huge and long-awaited boost for airlines and travel companies. Yet the controversial decision to keep quarantine measures in place for #travellers coming from France is discriminatory and not based on science, a French minister said on Thursday.
 
Dr. Simon Clarke, Microbiologist at Reading University, acknowledges that "it does seem odd. We're led to believe that the problem is with the (vaccine-resistant) Beta variant which is primarily in Reunion, not in France proper." But Dr. Clarke stresses that it's impossible to weigh in on the government's actual reasoning. "In the UK, we never know why the government puts certain countries on certain lists, it just doesn't tell us. We don't know what the metrics are that they look at, we don't know how they weigh those metrics."

Dr. Clarke offers an example of the questions that really make a difference in having a clearer understanding of how the pandemic is evolving: "What direction is France heading in? What direction is the UK heading in? How are these infections distributed amongst the population? Is there uniform geographical distribution or not?" Dr. Clarke has also observed the role that certain media in the UK have played, adding to the confusion and uncertainty during the pandemic: "The news is alive with ridiculous speculation, and people telling us that they know what's going to happen next when they don't."

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