The US is to end Covid vaccine requirements for foreign travellers next week, the White House has announced.
The Biden administration will end most of the last remaining federal Covid-19 vaccine rules on May 11, when the national public health emergency for coronavirus ends.
The requirements - which also apply to federal workers and contractors - are among the last vestiges of some of the more coercive measures taken by the government to promote vaccination as the deadly virus raged. Their end marks the latest display of how President Joe Biden’s administration is moving to treat Covid-19 as a routine, endemic illness.
“While I believe that these vaccine mandates had a tremendous beneficial impact, we are now at a point where we think that it makes a lot of sense to pull these requirements down,” White House Covid-19 co-ordinator Dr Ashish Jha said.
Deeply polarising at the time and the subject of numerous legal challenges - many of which were successful - the vaccination requirements were imposed by Mr Biden in successive waves in late 2022 as the nation’s vaccination rate plateaued even amid the emergence of new, more transmissible variants of Covid-19.
More than 100 million people at one time were covered by Mr Biden’s sweeping mandates, which he announced on September 9 2021, as the Delta variant of the virus was sickening more people than at any time up to that point in the pandemic.
Mr Biden had ruled out such requirements before taking office that January, but came to embrace them to change the behaviour of what he viewed to be a stubborn slice of the public that refused to be inoculated, saying they jeopardised the lives of others and the nation’s economic recovery.
“We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” Mr Biden said at the time.
The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are”, he said.
Federal courts and Congress have already rolled back Mr Biden’s vaccine requirements for large employers and military service members.
Mandates remain for many employees of the National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service and Department of Veterans Affairs - which implemented their own requirements for healthcare staff and others independent of the White House - while those agencies review their own requirements, the administration said.
More than 1.13 million people in the US have died of Covid-19 since the pandemic began more than three years ago, including 1,052 people in the week ending April 26, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
That was the lowest weekly death toll from the virus since March 2020.
“Covid continues to be a problem,” Dr Jha said.
“But our healthcare system or public health resources are far more able to respond to the threat that Covid poses to our country and do so in a way that does not cause problems with access to care for Americans.”
He added: “Some of these emergency powers are just not necessary in the same way anymore.”
