US health officials are pushing ahead with a Covid vaccine mandate for travelers entering the country — despite no evidence it reduces infection rates.
In an announcement Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated the policy rather than dropping it.
The US will now allow travelers into the country that had received at least one vaccination dose on or after August 16, 2022. They will still allow people in who had received at least two doses before this date.
Sticking with the vaccine mandate rule makes the US an international outlier. Only a handful of countries still require visitors to have received a Covid vaccine to gain entry such as Angola and Indonesia.
The CDC says it will allow people to enter the country who have received just one Covid vaccine since August 16, 2022. They will be considered fully vaccinated
Recent studies have shown that jabs don’t protect very well against onward transmission, even though they are highly effective at blocking death and severe disease.
A 2022 paper from the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, found that protection against an Omicron injection sparked by Covid vaccines faded to just nine percent within 25 weeks of a Pfizer shot.
A booster raised this protection to 60 percent for a month or two, but this protection also began to wane by week 10 after vaccination.
Experts have previously slammed decisions to keep Covid-era policies in place as ‘out of step’ with the rest of the world.
Dr Doug Badger, a senior research fellow at the center for health and welfare at the Heritage Foundation, told DailyMail.com: ‘Neither the European Union nor Canada imposes such a requirement.
‘Vaccines reduce the risk that an infected individual will develop severe illness, but they do not prevent transmission.
‘The administration should follow the science and rescind this policy.’
In its update, the CDC said: ‘Because some traveler vaccine records might not specify whether recent Moderna or Pfizer doses were bivalent, CDC will consider anybody with record of a single dose of Moderna or Pfizer vaccine issued on or after August 16, 2022, to meet the requirements of the Amended Order to board a plane to the United States.
‘This date was chosen because it represents the earliest that travelers could have received a bivalent booster.’
Covid vaccination requirements for foreign arrivals to the US by air are currently set to expire on May 11, 2023, says the Transportation Security Administration.
But authorities have renewed the policies on every single day that they were previously due to expire.
These rules were previously meant to expire on April 11, 2023, but moments before the deadline they were extended by another month.
Bivalent boosters target specific versions of Omicron, unlike the original vaccines which only targeted the Wuhan strain that was first to spread across the world.
Scientists argue that this means they provide better protection against severe disease and death from currently circulating strains. But there is little proof that they help to curtail the spread of the disease.
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.
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