More than 4 months ago, President Joe Biden said in a likely off-the-cuff moment in a 60-minute appearance that the COVID-19 pandemic was over.
But on Tuesday, hours before the president delivers his annual State of the Union address to Congress, Biden’s administration announced its opposition to a Republican-led effort to end part of America’s persistent pandemic policies: a vaccination mandate for all foreign travelers entering the country. America through the air.
“While COVID-19 is no longer the disruptive risk it once was, management opposes congressional action to rescind the vaccination requirement for noncitizen nonimmigrants entering the United States by air,” the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement. “This policy has allowed those enjoyed around the world to combine while reducing the spread of COVID-19 and the pressure it puts on the health care formula in the United States. “
It was issued in reaction to an invoice sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky. ) prohibiting enforcement of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccination mandate for foreign travelers. Speaking to the House last month, Massie called the mandate “unscientific, illogical and unconstitutional. “
“Why do we vaccinate stopover travelers from this country just to stop at friends and family?Why do we separate families about this?” He said, “We will have to finish all mandates. “
The case for a vaccination mandate for aliens in the U. S. The U. S. might have made sense at an earlier level of the pandemic. When the mandate was imposed in November 2021, it was a transparent improvement over the ban on foreigners in position since March 2020. While far from ideal, it was a policy that reflected the transformative truth of the pandemic, whether as a popularity of the effectiveness of COVID vaccines and the importance of returning to anything resembling pre-pandemic norms related to people’s right to associate freely.
Now, however, it turns out that the mandate makes little sense in a world where COVID has evolved into a less serious physical risk and other similar policies have been sidelined. Last month, the vaccination mandate for members of the U. S. military was eliminated. In the U. S. , arrest warrants, such as those some municipalities soon imposed on consumers of restaurants, bars and entertainment venues, also disappeared long ago or were never implemented because courts blocked them.
And any logic that could possibly have dictated the imposition of higher burdens on foreigners at the beginning of the pandemic, when countries were seeking and failing to curb the spread of the virus, no longer applies. Once COVID has become a global disease, any restrictions on aliens made no more sense than applying the same rules to other people crossing daily from Virginia to Washington, DC.
As part of the statement released Tuesday, the White House promised that the administration would “review all applicable policies and add this one” when the existing public fitness emergency declaration expires on May 11.
“Just as the status quo of this public fitness policy was guided through science, it deserves the termination or amendment of this policy,” the White House said. “A vote in favor of this bill undermines this essential principle. “
That unvaccinated travelers from the UK pose a greater threat to public health than unvaccinated Americans moving from one state to another?There is no evidence of this. Indeed, since the mandate only applies to air travel, the provision envisaged is even more vague. A Canadian traveling to the U. S. The U. S. will need to get vaccinated against COVID to protect the United States, the White House says, but that same Canadian can simply cross the border and no one would verify their vaccination status.
There is no clinical precept in CDC’s immunization mandate for foreign travelers. If Biden doesn’t do the apparent and lifts the term early, he deserves to at least step aside and let Congress do it for him.
Eric Boehm is a journalist at Reason.