The Biden Administration Will Soon Quit Nearly All COVID-19 Vaccination Requirements

The White House said that the administration of US President Joe Biden removes most remaining federal COVID-19 vaccination requirements next week, when the public health emergency due to the coronavirus ends. Writes about it AP News.

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Vaccine requirements for federal employees and federal contractors, as well as foreign air travelers in the US, expire May 11. The government is beginning the process of lifting vaccination requirements for educators, healthcare workers, and non-citizens at U.S. land borders.

These demands are among the last vestiges of enforcement action taken by the federal government to promote vaccination when the deadly virus was rampant. Their end marks the latest manifestation of how the Biden administration is moving towards treating COVID-19 as a common endemic disease.

“Although I believe these vaccine mandates have had a huge beneficial effect. We are now at a stage where it makes sense to lower these requirements,” said White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha.

On the subject: US authorities recommend additional vaccination against COVID-19: what you need to know

Highly polarized at the time and subject to numerous legal issues, vaccination requirements were introduced by Biden in successive waves in late 2022, when the country's vaccination rate stabilized even as new, more contagious variants of COVID-19 emerged.

Biden's mandates, which he announced on September 9, 2021, reached more than 100 million people simultaneously. In the US, the delta strain was still raging. Biden adopted such harsh demands to change the behavior of a stubborn part of society that refused to get vaccinated and endangered the lives of others, as well as the country's economic situation.

“We were patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal costs us all a lot,” Biden said then. “An unvaccinated minority could cause great harm.”

Federal courts and Congress have already struck down Biden's vaccine demands for major employers and military personnel.

Mandates remain for many National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service, and Department of Veterans Affairs employees who have implemented their own requirements. Vaccination requirements for medical personnel and others independent of the White House will remain while those agencies review their own requirements, the administration said.

More than 1,13 million people in the US have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began more than three years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including 1052 in the week ending April 26. It was the lowest weekly death toll from the virus since March 2020.

“COVID-19 continues to be a challenge,” noted Dr. Ashish Jha. “But our health care system or public health resources are much more capable of responding to the threat that COVID-19 poses to our country and doing so in a way that does not create barriers to care for Americans.”

He added: "Some of these emergency requirements are simply no longer needed."

More than 270 million people in the US, or just over 81% of the population, have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the CDC.

For more than a year now, U.S. health officials have been tracking a long-term response to COVID-19 that's more like the flu approach, with annually updated shots targeting the latest strains of the virus, especially those most vulnerable. But fewer than 56 million people in the US, or 17% of the population, have received a dose of the updated bivalent boosters, which became available in September 2022 and provide better protection against the omicron variant that circulates in the community.

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“We don't have the same national mandate for flu vaccines, but we're still seeing pretty good uptake of flu vaccines,” Jha stressed. “The goal is really to continue to encourage people to get vaccinated, but I don’t think mandates will be needed to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19 in the future.”

As federal mandates run out, Jah predicted that some employers, especially healthcare providers, might keep their vaccination requirements. Dr. Ashish Jha noted that at the hospital where he works, staff have been in need of influenza vaccinations for 20 years.

The White House COVID-19 coordinator dismissed concerns that lifting the requirement to vaccinate international travelers would raise the risk of a new variant being brought into the US from overseas. Biden has already lifted testing requirements for the virus for both US citizens and foreign travelers to the US.

Dr. Jha said the United States is already protected by a genomic traveler surveillance program that, among other things, checks for different strains of the virus in aircraft sewage.

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