Biden FINALLY announces COVID vaccine requirement for travelers to US will be scrapped on May 11

International travelers and federal employees will no longer be required to have Covid vaccinations from May 11, the Biden Administration has announced. 

Federal employees, federal contractors and those flying into the US will no longer have to be up to date with Covid shots from next Thursday, the same time the Covid public health emergency ends. 

The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also announced that vaccine requirements will be scrapped for Head Start educators, healthcare facilities that receive funding from Medicare or Medicaid and certain non-citizens at the land border. 

President Biden had made it clear that virtually all Covid-related measures were going to be dropped but they ones hadn’t been mentioned.

The measures finally bring the US in line with the rest of the world. Very few countries still require visitors to have received a Covid vaccine to gain entry, including Angola and Indonesia. 

The Biden-Harris Administration cited the statistics showing that since January 2021, Covid deaths have dropped by 95 percent, and hospitalizations are down nearly 91 percent.

The statement said: ‘We are in a different phase of our response to Covid-19 than we were when many of these requirements were put into place.’

It added: ‘These measures are no longer necessary.’ 

Recent studies have shown the Covid vaccines, while able to prevent hospitalization and death, are not as effective against transmission of the virus.

A 2022 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that after 25 weeks, the protection the Pfizer vaccine gave to recipients against Omicron infection fell to just nine percent.

A booster shot raised this protection to 67 percent initially, before dropping to 45 percent after just two weeks.

Experts have previously slammed decisions to keep Covid-era policies in place as ‘out of step’ with the rest of the world.

Bivalent boosters specifically target the Omicron variant, unlike the original vaccines which targeted the virus’s initial Wuhan strain.

Scientists argue that this means they provide better protection against severe disease and death from currently circulating strains. 

Most countries have already dropped their vaccination requirements for visitors amid mounting evidence that they do not slow the spread of the virus.

The UK dumped its Covid vaccination requirement for visitors in March last year, now more than a year ago.

France followed suit in August, while the European Union lifted all its Covid-related travel requirements for its members in December.

China, in line with most of the rest of the world, also does not require travelers to have a Covid vaccine. 

It does, however, say they should have a negative Covid test result at least 48 hours before travel.

There are also far higher levels of immunity in the population now from vaccinations or previous infections than in the early days of the pandemic.

About three in four Americans were estimated to have some level of immunity against Covid in February last year by John Hopkins. It is likely that current levels are now even higher.

Back in January, President Biden announced the end to the Covid national emergency on May 11 – eight months after declaring the pandemic was over.

The move to end the national emergency and public health emergency declarations will formally restructure the federal coronavirus response to treat the virus as an endemic threat to public health that can be managed through agencies’ normal authorities. 

It will also shift the development of vaccines and treatments away from the direct management of the federal government.

Then-President Donald Trump first declared the Covid pandemic a national emergency on March 13, 2020.

The emergencies have been repeatedly extended by Biden since he took office in January 2021.