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Politico (26 February 2021)

By David M. Herszenhorn

A year into the pandemic, European citizens are suffering from full-blown coronavirus fatigue, top EU leaders said Thursday, and the leaders themselves seem rather exhausted as their own efforts to manage the crisis repeatedly get thwarted or delayed. 

After a long videoconference, EU heads of state and government said they had reached a consensus on creating a standard digital "vaccine certificate" that theoretically should help ease border restrictions and revive travel. But European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said there are still numerous scientific, technical and political obstacles, including the inability of leaders to agree on the basic issue of what exactly the certificates will be used for.

From a technical standpoint, it will take three months to develop the new technology, von der Leyen said, and that seemed just as well given a bigger logistical problem: Even now, very few people in the EU are actually getting vaccinated, and the leaders don't have any immediate ability to fix that.

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