Andy Slavitt, who served as Covid-19 advisor to Biden for several months this year, is among the critics, saying the energy should be focused on vaccinations in Africa instead.
“Travel bans do not seem to come close to the panacea,” tweeted Slavitt on Friday. “And it penalizes countries and their economies that make and report discoveries.” He added on Saturday, “A far better response would be to mass-ship hundreds of millions of vaccines to the region.”
The discovery of the variant by South Africa triggered a market sell-off on Friday. Airlines fell and the S&P 500 closed 2.3% lower, the largest one-day decline since February. Middle East stocks fell on Sunday despite South African health officials said the first Omicron cases were mild.
Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical advisor, said Sunday that travel bans would “never completely” prevent a highly communicable virus from entering the country. “But what you can do is delay it enough to better prepare us,” he said on ABC’s This Week.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told Fox News Sunday that travelers entering the US still need to be tested and foreigners entering the US need to be vaccinated. He called the curbs a “temporary” measure.
“This is just the best advice from the public health experts. And you will find other countries like the UK and the EU doing the same, ”he said. “We’re not going to say this will be there for long to block travel from the countries that we know Omicron is already spreading.”
The White House referred to Fauci and Collins’ comments on the request for comment.
Nonetheless, the measure has been criticized as being modestly effective at best. Italy’s first known Omicron wearer, for example, arrived two weeks ago, had a negative test before his flight and was in Italy for days before being diagnosed.
“Travel bans have not been very effective throughout the pandemic,” Peter Hotez, professor and dean of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN. “I think it would be far more productive than travel bans to focus our energies again on trying to vaccinate southern Africa.”
Celine Gounder, a doctor who served as Covid-19 advisor to the Biden transition team, said the bans Biden announced on Friday were too slow and had “massive loopholes.” That includes the lack of bans in Belgium and other countries where cases have been detected and that US citizens are exempt, she said.
Rick Bright, a former head of the United States’ advanced research and development agency for biomedicine who also advised the transition team, repeated the same.
“Porous travel bans will do very little to slow the spread of a virus in the air (play the tape),” tweeted Bright, who now heads the Rockefeller Foundation’s pandemic prevention institute, on Sunday. “The US and the world should procure vaccines and resources to vaccinate people across Africa.”
Biden said on Friday the move was a precautionary measure. He urged other nations to increase donations and support a U.S. appeal for a surrender of intellectual property for Covid-19 vaccines. The U.S. has pledged donations of over 1 billion doses of vaccine by mid-2022, but hasn’t pledged anything new for Africa since the advent of omicron.
“Can’t hide”
Biden rejected a question on Friday whether travel restrictions are preventing countries from commenting on new variants.
“I’d say it’s ridiculous because you can’t hide the variations,” he said in Nantucket, where he spent the Thanksgiving holiday with his family. “It’s not like anyone can hide the fact that there’s a new way of making people sick faster.”
Gounder disagreed.
“If we punish countries (e.g. South Africa) that have been scientifically transparent and cooperative … how do we think they and others (e.g. China) will behave in the future?” She tweeted.
Slavitt said testing people on arrival and requiring quarantine for positive cases was “reasonable”.
U.S. measures reintroduced country-based restrictions that were abandoned earlier this month in favor of a system based on whether a traveler is vaccinated or not – regardless of which country they are from or have recently visited. The US now has a hybrid system that leaves vaccinated foreigners largely open and citizens completely open, while banning anyone, vaccinated or not, who has been in the eight African countries in the past two weeks.
© 2021 Bloomberg LP
