The Biden administration announced last week that it will end the Covid-19 emergency declarations in May, but Republicans have a chance at terminating one outdated, unscientific lockdown-era restriction sooner with a House vote on Wednesday.
The United States is the only major Western nation still mandating international visitors accept genetic vaccinations against Covid-19. Even countries that once had the strictest Covid lockdowns dropped such travel restrictions long ago.
The few other countries and far-flung island territories still requiring international travelers to be vaccinated for Covid-19 are: Tokelau, Niue, Pitcairn, Tonga, Liberia, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Fiji, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Palau, Nauru, Turkmenistan, and Turks and Caicos (you can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of some of these places), and possibly a few others.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives will consider a bill sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., to end the visitor vaccination requirement. The House had voted last week to immediately end the Covid-19 national emergency first declared in March 2020, which would have affected many more Covid-era mandates, but the measure is not expected to pass the Senate. However, the narrower legislation to allow travelers who haven’t taken genetic vaccines has a better chance of passing, as Democrats should not want to be seen as xenophobic and behind the rest of the world.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University tweeted in support of the legislation: “There is no good reason, scientific or epidemiologic, to discriminate against the covid unvaccinated. The US is an international outlier in retaining this irrational policy.”
The United Kingdom has been open to unvaccinated travelers since March. Austria, which had some of the harshest Covid policies in Europe,
