Hot on the heels of Dr. Anthony Fauci yet again voicing his strong support for a vaccine requirement on domestic flights, President Joe Biden said Tuesday he would impose such a mandate if his medical team recommends it.
According to The Hill report, while out for a walk in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Biden was asked by reporters when he would make a decision on domestic travel vaccine requirements, to which the president replied, “When I get a recommendation from the medical team.”
The discussion on allowing only vaccinated travelers to board planes for domestic travel has been going on in the administration for months. Even though the president admitted his failure to handle the virus he once promised to “shut down” and shifted responsibility to state governors earlier this week, it seems that the president would not give up an opportunity to take away even more freedoms from Americans under the pretext of a “public health emergency.” Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the emergence of the Omicron variant caused the White House to revisit questions over whether to bar the unvaccinated from traveling by plane.
Speaking at the end of November, shortly after Omicron was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) a “variant of concern” and the United States shut down travel from affected African countries, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the president “wasn’t taking any options off the table, but he’s going to rely on the advice of his health and medical experts.” The president, in turn, stated that the “scientific community” had not been recommending a vaccine mandate for domestic air travel, per The Hill.
Biden’s chief medical advisor and COVID guru Dr. Fauci doubled down on the idea. The New American reported on Monday that Dr. Fauci wholeheartedly endorsed the measure since it would drive the vaccination numbers up.
“A vaccine requirement for a person getting on the plane is just another level of getting people to have a mechanism that would spur them to get vaccinated; namely, you can’t get on a plane unless you’re vaccinated, which is just another one of the ways of getting requirements, whatever that might be,” Fauci told ABC’s Jonathan Karl.
“So I mean, anything that could get people more vaccinated would be welcome. But with regard to the spread of virus in the country, I mean, I think if you look at wearing a mask and the filtration on planes, things are reasonably safe,” he added.
“Notably, Fauci did not say that mandated vaccination on domestic air travel would reduce infection, only that it be a mechanism to incentivize further vaccination among the American public,” we noted.
In a news briefing with the White House COVID-19 task force Wednesday, Fauci stressed that when it comes to “keeping America safe … everything that is an intervention is always on the table, and always discussed, and we discuss it regularly.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told National Public Radio the same day that the agency was “considering potential in [that] policy” yet did not endorsee it — yet.
She said, “I know that the CDC strongly recommends vaccination for everyone. I know that the CDC strongly recommends boosting for everyone who is eligible.” Walensky went on to echo Biden’s ominous warning to the unvaccinated whom, he said, face “a winter of severe illness and death.” Walensky used milder words, but the message was the same: “And I do know that if you are in the hospital now, you’re 17 times more likely to be unvaccinated than vaccinated. If you are in a fatality case right now, quite sadly, you are 20% — 20-fold less likely to be boosted compared to somebody who is boosted.”
The statement comes as the United States is seeing a staggering number of the breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated. While the survival rate for the previous strains has been estimated at “no lower than 99.7 percent” for all age groups under 60 years old, the Omicron, which is now dominating the United States, is proving to be even less dangerous.
Walensky was either unaware of those facts or willingly ignored them, and stated that the focus of her agency was finding the “ways to get people vaccinated.” She continued, “Certainly, [vaccine mandates for] domestic flights [have] been a topic of conversation, but that is not something we’re revisiting right now.”
Some Democrat lawmakers have stepped up their calls for a vax-or-test mandate for air travelers. In November, thirty-six of them penned a letter to Biden, which was led by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Representatives Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), urging the Biden administration to impose such a mandate for airline passengers.
The coercive mandates already in place in the private sector have been a “huge success” in forcing people to receive a COVID shot, and such an approach should be applied to domestic air travel, the letter stressed. To support the claim, the Democrats cited research by the Kaiser Family Foundation that has shown that unvaccinated people would be “significantly more likely” to get a jab if it was a requirement to fly on an airplane.
While the Democrat legislators and the establishment scientists claim that stripping unvaccinated Americans of their freedom of movement would prevent infections, the assumption is not supported by medical facts. Vaccinated people are able to spread the virus at similar rates to the unvaccinated (see here and here). Even Walensky’s own agency admitted that back in July, when it reiterated the “recommendation” for fully vaccinated people to wear masks to prevent them from passing the virus to others.
