What was claimed
Airlines in Spain and Russia have warned people vaccinated against Covid-19 not to fly.
Our verdict
This is not true. There is no evidence of any airline saying this.
Vaccinated people are not warned against flying
We’ve seen several posts on social media claiming that people in Spain and Russia who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 have been advised not to fly. Readers have asked us to look into it as well.
This claim is not true.
Claims about travel advice in Russia seem to originate from an article on a Russian website published on 31 May, which says (translated by Google) that vaccinated people “may be banned from flying”. The article offers no evidence of this happening, or of any plans to introduce such a ban, saying only that it is possible, in the opinion of a doctor that the article quotes.
A subsequent article on a Swiss website repeated the claim, with links to other articles, including one on a Spanish website.
The Spanish article in fact made a slightly different false claim. It said (in translation) that “the main airlines in the world are discussing whether it is advisable to admit vaccinated customers”. It gave no evidence for this, and other fact checkers have not been able to find any. The International Air Transport Association told Reuters that it was not aware of any airlines considering this.
A Dutch article published earlier in May claimed that information about these supposed “discussions” came from the Telegram messaging platform.
Finally, the claim that “airlines in Spain and Russia are warning people who have been vaccinated against coronavirus not to travel because of the risk of blood clots” was repeated by the Australian politician and broadcaster Cory Bernardi on Sky News Australia on 11 June. In his segment, Mr Bernardi gave the Swiss article as his source.
It’s rare in healthy people, but long journeys, including by plane, can cause deep vein thrombosis (DVT), which is when a blood clot forms in a vein, usually in the leg.
There is a possible link between the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine against Covid and a different type of very rare blood clot.
However, we could find no evidence that any Covid vaccine raises the risk of DVT while flying.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because vaccinated passengers are neither banned from flying, nor warned against it.