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BERLIN, Germany, April 7, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The German health minister announced on Easter Sunday that citizens who have received two shots of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines will be eligible for exemptions to some lockdown restrictions, whereas the unvaccinated won’t benefit from these.

Germany’s health minister Jens Spahn, speaking to national newspaper Bild on Sunday, said that certain normal activities, like visiting different kinds of shops and retail businesses, will become less restricted for those who have received the vaccine. “Anyone who is vaccinated can go to the shop or the hairdresser without further testing,” the open homosexual and member of the Christian Democrats said.

The decision to give back to vaccinated individuals certain freedoms, expected to begin in the coming weeks, stems from data provided by a recent research paper on the transmission of COVID-19 from people who have been vaccinated against the virus.

The study, published by Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (comparable to the CDC in the U.S.), concludes that the risk of transmission from vaccinated subjects is minimal two weeks after receiving the final shot.

Spahn explained that “[a]ccording to the research, the risk of virus transmission by people who have been fully vaccinated from the 15th day after the second vaccination dose is lower than an asymptomatic person who has tested negative with a rapid antigen test,” which led the German government to consider moving forward with their proposed “vaccine passport” scheme.

On the back of the Robert Koch Institute data, Spahn suggested that the “current state of knowledge indicates that vaccinated persons probably no longer play a significant role in the epidemiology (i.e. transmission) of the disease.”

In addition to being able to make use of “non-essential” businesses once again, vaccinated Germans will be afforded the freedom to travel internationally, without being asked to quarantine upon their return: “So anyone who has been fully vaccinated can be treated in the future like someone who has tested negative.”

Despite the promise of quasi-normality following vaccination, all Germans will still have to comply with physical distancing orders and mask mandates, the German government confirmed.

Alongside the news of impending vaccine passports, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel is reportedly poised to spring a host of new lockdown measures on the nation, supposedly to curtail the spread of the coronavirus. Among the measures proposed are nationwide school closures, a requirement for employers to use unreliable PCR tests on their employees, and issuing temporary stay-at-home orders.

While an increase in COVID cases has been recorded in Germany in the period leading up to Easter, over the same period daily deaths have reduced to little more than the lowest recorded figure in the year since lockdowns began, according to Worldometer.

Regardless of the dwindling death toll, Spahn said Monday that the public needs “to break this third wave with each other and reduce contacts. Especially in the private sector, in schools, at work, where we can.”

“I think it is much more important that the emergency brake is applied consistently and that we break this wave quickly, sooner rather than later,” he added.

Spahn’s announcement falls in line with a growing number of nations worldwide which have revealed plans to institute vaccine-related regulations, requiring certification of vaccination to freely participate in the economy and to travel outside of national borders.

Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson, who has promised to reopen the U.K. economy fully from June 21 in line with a “roadmap out of lockdown,” told the BBC on Tuesday that “you don’t need any … kind of certificate” to visit pubs and restaurants on May 17, when indoor dining is set to resume. He did, however, explicitly state that the future of overseas travel will inevitably require some element of vaccine certification.

Johnson noted that “several other countries” are also considering implementing a vaccine passport system and that such documentation “is going to be a fact of life, probably.”

Elsewhere Johnson confirmed that “there’s definitely going to be a world in which international travel will use vaccine passports … You can see already that other countries, the aviation industry, are interested in those and there’s a logic to that.”

The prime minister announced that vaccine certification is only one of a number of ways by which Brit’s will be asked to signal “that you’re not contagious.” Johnson emphasized the role that COVID testing will take on for proving one’s contagion status for use within national borders, declaring that “from Friday [April 9] everybody [in England] can get free lateral-flow tests also on the NHS and on the web.”

“I think when it comes to trying to make sure that we give maximum confidence to business and to customers here in the UK, there are three things — there’s your immunity, whether you have had it before, so you have got natural antibodies, whether you have been vaccinated, and then of course whether you have had a test,” he said, adding that “[t]hose three things working together will be useful for us as we go forward.”