Absurd: U.S. Extends Vaccine Requirement For Foreigners Yet No Longer Considers Covid An Emergency

The federal government’s ‘public health emergency’ over Covid-19 is set to end May 11 – but the U.S. still imposes a vaccine requirement on foreign travelers. This makes no sense.

  • There’s no meaningful effect on virus spread by requiring foreign visitors to the U.S. to be vaccinated against Covid-19.

  • And the government will no longer consider Covid-19 an emergency in any case.

The new CDC requirement calls a single dose of a bivalent vaccine taken since August 16, 2022 “full vaccination” for purposes of non-residents entering the country. There should no longer be any such requirement, just as most of the rest of the world has lifted requirements too. It’s absurd that they are changing the requirement now, not eliminating it, given what the science says.

When Covid-19 vaccines were first introduced, they were far more effective against infection and spread of the virus than they are today because they were much better matched to the actual virus that was spreading and because that virus didn’t spread as effectively as it has muted to spread today. Indeed, by the time vaccine formulas were updated they were (1) updated to a variant that was no longer dominant, and (2) still half targeted to the ancestral Wuhan strain of the virus.

While there’s strong hope that nasal vaccines under development as boosters will be sterilizing such that they will prevent not just symptoms but actual infection and therefore spread, there’s no longer as much interest in fast-tracking as there was under Operation Warp Speed.

When vaccine requirements were first introduced, there was an argument that they would help reduce spread. They didn’t do this, because they weren’t part of a comprehensive program that might have been effective. They did not apply to U.S. citizens. And Congress didn’t legislate them in other contexts. When unmasked, unvaccinated Americans could congregate without limits in bars in many states foreigners were at greater risk of contracting Covid-19 once here than bringing it into the country (and, of course, it was already here and spreading whether they did so or not).

The restrictions imposed by the U.S. were performative. They were not sufficient to influence the course of the virus, and thus did not on their own make sense when instituted. Now that the government no longer even considers this a public health emergency it’s absurd that restrictions remain in place.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. And one wonders why much of the world looks at the US with disdain and dismay and perceives it as a clown car.

  2. There should no longer be any doubt that we Americans live in a society that has TOO MUCH government.

    And no one knows how to control this monster anymore.

    Biden and the rest of the politicians are destroying the value of our money with their borrowing, overspending, and inflation.

    The time is coming when the rest of the world will no longer want our dollars, and they will all start flooding back into the US. Then you’ll see inflation like you’ve never seen before. Any value in our savings will be wiped out.

  3. This policy brought to you by Big Pharma. When will people wake up and realize who’s been behind all this nonsense?

  4. The CDC guideline requires a single dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Much of the EU, Asia, and South America vaccinated their populations with Sinovac and AZ, which are much less effective and not FDA-authorized in the US. That seems to be the source of the inconsistency. As you know, many countries have non-emergency vaccine requirements that they apply to visitors from the US.

  5. “ When Covid-19 vaccines were first introduced, they were far more effective against infection and spread of the virus than they are today because they were much better matched to the actual virus that was spreading and because that virus didn’t spread as effectivel”

    Those who attended the Cape Cod “party” in July 2021 would beg to differ. Look up the CDC study related to Barnstable county, Massachusetts July 2021. 70% breakthrough infection.

    Absurd indeed.

  6. @Roberta Franco – you put party in quotes for a reason. It was possible to spread asymptomatic infection with “close contact” that those who talked up that event failed to detail and specify…

  7. I’m not sure how accurate this is cause the CDC(whom I have no use for) has waived such requirements for visitors from China, Hong Kong & Maceu

  8. This is beyond insane. America is such a joke nowadays.

    A terrorist regime meddling in Ukraine, Sudan, and wherever else, while spreading sick ideology and deadly vaccines.

    Look at the mask-Karens from the coasts. There’s a reason people burned witches.

  9. @Roberta Franco and Gary Leff:
    For your reading enjoyment, I am sharing the CDC report from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) regarding the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, in July 2021. It includes information on COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections linked to large public gatherings. Find the report here:

    https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm

  10. The whole purpose of this post was to draw out the MAGA crazies.

    I don’t see it as unreasonable or inconsistent to not call COVID an emergency here and still not want hordes of unvaccinated (or with inferior vaccines) and possibly infected people coming in. Would you rather the cdc still called COVID an emergency?

    Yes some rules apply differently to foreigners…wow how novel!

  11. These restrictions only apply for air travel. You can always fly to Mexico and walk across the border where there are no vaccine requirements.

  12. @Pete – while that may or may not be true, Gary still stands behind his viewpoints and I think he’s fair here. We need balance and someone who isn’t too far left or too far right. Gary seems correct about this being a stupid restriction at this point so I appreciate him writing this. We need more consideration to complex issues in travel that have far reaching ripple effects

  13. Do you guys have an editor? Over the past week I think you’re 0 for 20 on not having some basic typo in your articles. Unless you really meant to say the virus’s volume has been turned down to 0.

    Seriously.. EVERY article has at least one case of a word being replaced by a similar but different word or just plain misspelled.

  14. To the topic at hand, I’m pro-vaccination, but the “requirement” is so hollow as to be ridiculous. A Johnson&Johnson shot 2 years ago is about the same as no shot at all at this point.

  15. Is Yellow Fever an emergency? No. Yet, a person who is traveling from a central African country might be required to provide evidence of a Yellow Fever vaccination. Consider the same for any other disease. Other than the politicization of COVID, how is this any different? Typical inflammatory article calculated to inflame the dogmatic readership. Tiring . . . very tiring.

  16. @Lee – use some science and logic. It can make sense to require vaccination and testing where (1) a disease is not endemic in the United States, and (2) there’s a unique risk of bringing it in.

    Covid-19 is already in the United States. It has spread here so much that there’s already so much background immunity it is no longer considered an emergency. If you think there’s a public health benefit to the requirement then (1) state what you believe the benefit is, and (2) show your work!

  17. I’m fine with this rule. If anything, it should be expanded to other vaccines as well. We don’t want foreigners leaching on free emergency healthcare in the US.

  18. @Omar The unvaccinated can just walk across the Southern border and still leach away.

  19. @ Chris Raehl:
    Mistake-free, as far as grammar, spelling, syntax, punctuation, typos, and anything else for which an editor might be useful are concerned, I think Gary’s articles are 0 for n, where “0” represents the number of prefect articles and “n” represents the total number of articles he written, evah. Editor, pfft.

  20. @ LadyOlives said: “And one wonders why much of the world looks at the US with disdain and dismay and perceives it as a clown car.”

    People are still coming in droves to get a slice of the clown car. And you? You’re not gone yet?

  21. Thanks for the nice image of the CDC card. They’re getting a little hard to find. Plus, the instructions on Telegraph (i.e., reminder to buy a good guillotine paper cutter, how to print on both sides, what bond paper to use, what color pen to use, and most importantly the right batch codes for your state and date, etc.) are now buried with spam on the Telegraph channel.

    Me and my capillaries are ever thankful to those who posted those initial PDF files. I traveled as usual throughout the freakout, and I’m still among the quick. 🙂

  22. As you said, ABSURD! CDC estimate 98% of the US population has had Covid infection and/or Covid vaccination. The disease is now endemic; we will live with for the rest of our lives.

  23. ” It was possible to spread asymptomatic infection…”

    Gary is so deficient in this subject, it’s unbelievable. He is so uninformed on all things Covid, he still believes the “asymptomatic” garbage. This was one of the very first fallacies they promulgated to raise the level of fear. How is it possible he’s still parroting these falsehoods? He has been wrong about everything from the beginning of this scam.

  24. It’s utterly stupid. At this point the vaccine is unlikely to save you from infection, it’s merit is in reducing severity. That protects only the vaccinated person, it provides effectively zero herd protection. As has been said, it’s endemic here already, there’s nothing to be gained by keeping out the infected other than if they have a new, dangerous variant–and what drives that is how well it evades prior antibodies and thus the vaccine is very unlikely to stop it.

    However, I don’t think this is overpowering government as much as the political need to be seen to **do something** about a problem whether there’s anything meaningful that can be done or not. This virus has already shown us that it’s already escaped before anyone takes note. Nothing less than 100% quarantine on arrival keeps it from crossing borders. And that doesn’t mean what the previous occupant of the White House did in keeping out non-residents from China but doing nothing about residents even if they were symptomatic.

    As for the comparison to Yellow Fever–we (and most of the rest of the world) require the vaccine because Yellow Fever is **not** present in the US. It’s the same reason we have pretty strict agriculture inspection compared to most of the world–pests are far more of a threat east-west than they are north-south and we have no east-west land borders. That’s why Australia is even stricter than us–there are more pests that haven’t made it there.

  25. The policy of *still* requiring foreigners (ie, non-citizens) to get jabbed before entering the US is totally emblematic of a government that is woefully out-of-date and out-of-touch with *Reality*! Truth be told, those jabs were *never* going to work, anyway, for a variety of reasons (including massively fraudulent conducts by Big Pharma and Pfizer in particular), but a big one is that *not* being able to keep up with deliveries for timely public dispensing, against the speed of mutations by the underlying strains of coronavirus, automatically dooms the effectiveness of that mass jabbing effort before even getting started!

    So now we have billions around the world jabbed with products that could *never* have been “current” with the then-prevalent strains, anyway, which basically accomplished … what? Note that I do *not* subscribe to those *projections* about “numbers of lives saved” because, to me, that requires being prescient about one’s possible future without being jabbed, which can *never* be ascertained once jabbed! We can *only* count the numbers of actual deaths as *factual*! Note that the current global trends with abnormally higher Excess Mortality numbers after massive jabbing give rise to *real* concerns about a totally *different* type of side-effect from those jabs!

    Furthermore, even Pfizer’s own internal documents have been exposed to reveal that its mRNA formulation would *not* protect against getting infected, or further spreading to others, as it only aimed to suppress the *intensity* of the infection symptoms, once infected. This means that you could *still* become infected and spread to others, but *not* know about your currently infected status, due to suppression of infection symptoms! Too many NON-experts have *conflated* such “suppression” as being equivalent to “prevention” since those infection symptoms appeared to have been “eliminated”!

    This manifestation might also help to explain the endless confusions surrounding whether “asymptomatic” spreading of SARS-CoV-2 among the populace can occur — totally *ironic* that those jabs could actually exacerbate incidents of being infected and spreading to others by “masking” the very symptoms that would have indicated infection (and, hence, encourage taking precautions against exposing to others)!

    So what has been accomplished with the totally *hypocritical* mandate that requires those jabs upon international travelers who want to *legally* enter the US? What about the totally porous southern US border, where millions illegally “sneak” into the US, anyway? Do they have to also show “proof of jabs” before doing so?

  26. The function of this policy is not only a political but pragmatic to reduce hospitalizations and costs to the healthcare system when people come. I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all, and I think your article needlessly promotes skepticism of public health officials and their science. You can’t control Americans but you can control who is coming in to the country, and who comes in with insurance that can fully pay for such expensive stays? This is a way to reduce that cost and burden on the health care system; I support it.

  27. Not absurd at all. The current recommendation is for all adults to get vaccinated. Now it’s being simplified to one bivalent shot on the assumption that most people have been infected at least once or vaccinated. The exception is small children still need more than one shot because quite a few of them have not been vaccinated or infected.

    This pandemic has shown how stupid the American public is and how woefully inadequate their medical knowledge is.

  28. “This pandemic has shown how stupid the American public is…”

    Absolutely! But not for the reasons you think.

  29. @garyleff you — like many people — are still unwilling to accept the scientific fact that ALL OF THE COVID VACCINES HAVE BEEN COMPLETE FAILURES. The only proven “benefit” to the initial doses was to DELAY your susceptibility to Covid. There is plenty of evidence (albeit difficult to completely prove, because the gov’t has refused to collect and/or publish the data — that you later became MORE susceptible to Covid!

    None of this makes me happy. I got vaccinated, believing “the experts” knew what they were doing. Sadly, they did not, and the mass hysteria at the time made all of us more trusting of this experimental drug therapy than we should have been.

    But, at least, we now see eye-to-eye. The current vaccine mandate for foreigners to enter the US is an evil, stupid abomination.

  30. I’d be willing to bet over 50% of Americans wouldn’t even meet this insane requirement.

    And imagine if Trump said this. Ahhhhhh the xenophobia!!!

  31. @derek
    “… small children still need more than one shot because quite a few of them have not been vaccinated or infected” … AND … “This pandemic has shown how stupid the American public is and how woefully inadequate their medical knowledge is.”

    So you think that those jabs have been safe and effective? And you want small children (ages less than 9) to get multiple jabs, when their COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate averages around 0.002%? Do life-long adverse side-effects from those jabs matter for those small children? And even after a key player on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, during the middle of the pandemic, now *confesses* that those jabs did *not* prevent infections, as witness what Dr Deborah Birx revealed during a July 22, 2022 TV interview? Pay special attention to her very first sentence —

    “DR. BIRX: I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines, and it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization. It will. But let’s be very clear: 50% of the people who died from the Omicron surge were older, vaccinated. So that’s why I’m saying even if you’re vaccinated and boosted, if you’re unvaccinated right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid. It’s effective. It’s a great antiviral. And really, that is what’s going to save your lives right now if you’re over 70, which if you look at the hospitalizations, hospitalizations are rising steadily with new admissions, particularly in those over 70. And so if you live in the South – I know people keep talking about the fall – I’m worried about the South.”

    Well, she got half of it correct — those jabs did *not* protect against infection and 50% of those who died from the Omicron surge were *vaccinated* (albeit older folks)! As for her concerns about the South during last Fall, nothing manifested to cause any alarms! But she should now realize that, as she currently works with a couple of business entities in the Dallas area.

    However, Paxlovid is *not* very effective, as it has issues with *rebounds* of infections after a few days of use, as Dr Anthony Fauci personally experienced, with even *worse* symptoms during those rebounds, and as President Biden *also* experienced after his use of Paxlovid. Many medical experts say that the *actual* effectiveness of Paxlovid requires more clinical studies, despite protestations by some others to the contrary.

    With respect to spreading, those who are infected can spread their infection to others, so the *fact* that those jabs did *not* prevent infection, also means that they did *not* prevent spreading, either! All those jabs did, was to “suppress” symptoms of infection, which misled many non-experts to thereby assume that those jabs were effective to “prevent” infection (and therefore spreading as well)! This might help to explain that controversy over “asymptomatic spreading”!

  32. @CuriousCat. So curious but wrong….

    “So you think that those jabs have been safe and effective? And you want small children (ages less than 9) to get multiple jabs, when their COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate averages around 0.002%?”

    The Moderna vaccine is safe and effective.

    It is not “I”. The current CDC recommendation is small children get 2 or 3 vaccine doses, not unspecified “multiple jabs”.

    A couple thousand kids have died from Covid. The death rate from car accidents is not that high but children are required to wear seat belts. More kids have died from Covid in 3 years than gun deaths. In 2021, 134 kids 1-4 years died from gunshot wounds in the U.S.

    Covid has killed over 1.6 million people in the U.S. That is equivalent of killing EVERY adult woman in the state of Connecticut or Utah or Oregon, 100% of adult women.

  33. derek is the perfect example of someone so consumed by the propaganda, he believes everything spit out by the “experts”. Honestly, most people know at this point that those Covid death numbers are simply fiction.

  34. @James N
    Compared to someone like you who with your absurd buddy Alex who like to eschew all facts to suit your ridiculous bs.

  35. I always love the irrelevant, pointless comments from Rog. He never offers anything of value. Of course, he also fell for the entirety of the scam. Unbelievably, he still hasn’t figured it out.

  36. Stick to credit cards and travel Gary. You’re not good at either immunology or public health.

    There’s a public health benefit to requiring vaccination that has nothing to do transmission: reducing hospital burden, avoiding getting actually sick. Its perfectly reasonable for government to want to limit the potential for foreign visitors needing hospital resources.

  37. @derek
    “So curious but wrong….” –>
    ——–
    We’ll see about who is actually wrong … read below!
    ———————————————————————
    “The Moderna vaccine is safe and effective.” –>
    ——–
    Based on what *proof*? Just because you claim that mRNA jabs are “safe and effective” does *not*, therefore, mean that they are so! You should read up on the *prolific* scientific medical studies that have *now debunked* legacy “safety” and “effectiveness” claims by Big Pharma! You should research *what* are actually *inside* of those mRNA jabs. You should research *how* those components within, are actually *harmful* to the human body and its immune system. You should research what a negative VE (Vaccine Effectiveness) factor represents and, more importantly, what its implications are (ie, one is *more* likely to get infected *after* getting jabbed than not getting jabbed at all). Or do you prefer to take at “face value” everything that those government agencies throw at you? Did you grasp the implications of what Dr. Birx confessed, in that interview quote from my prior post above?

    Furthermore, let’s look at the recorded adverse side effects from COVID-19 jabs vs. legacy non-COVID-19 *true* vaccines (from 2021 state of West Australia Vaccine Safety Surveillance Report) —

    Non-COVID-19 …………………….. 11.1 adverse events/100,000 doses
    COVID-19 …………………………….. 264.1 adverse events/100,000 doses

    So *how* does this data indicate a “safe” COVID-19 jab?
    ———————————————————————
    “The current CDC recommendation is small children get 2 or 3 vaccine doses, not unspecified ‘multiple jabs’.

    A couple thousand kids have died from Covid. The death rate from car accidents is not that high but children are required to wear seat belts. More kids have died from Covid in 3 years than gun deaths. In 2021, 134 kids 1-4 years died from gunshot wounds in the U.S.” –>
    ——–
    Are you saying that 2-3 doses do *not* constitute “multiple” jabs? The last time that I checked, “multiple” means “more than one”? I made *no* references to “unspecified” … you brought that up!

    As I asked above, do you prefer to take at “face value” whatever the CDC throws at you? Is the CDC always correct with its pronouncements, 100% of the time? Are you aware of identified adverse side-effects that those mRNA jabs have already inflicted upon jabbed children, including some *deaths*? Did you know that Pfizer even noted in its internal documents that 97 children had died after getting its jabs? Since Moderna is also mRNA, *why* would you think that its version will be much different in behavior and side-effects than Pfizer, especially since the jab dosages with Moderna are *higher* in strength?

    Your attempt to analogize child seat belts with those mRNA jabs is totally *fallacious* because those child seat belts had already been *proven* to enhance *safety,* whereas those mRNA jabs have *not* actually been properly “certified” for *safety,* as field experiences have shown excessive rates of adverse side effects upon children, as compared to legacy non-COVID-19 *true* vaccines! So this indicates that potential risks from jabbing outweigh the averaged 0.002% Infection Fatality Rate from COVID-19 for children 9 years of age or younger!
    ———————————————————————
    “Covid has killed over 1.6 million people in the U.S. That is equivalent of killing EVERY adult woman in the state of Connecticut or Utah or Oregon, 100% of adult women.” –>
    ——–
    There is the claim that 1.6 million perished due to COVID-19, but you should be researching how many of those were *not* directly due to COVID-19, itself, but were *actually* the results of the ultimate worst-case adverse side effect (ie, death) from getting jabbed with *ineffective* and *unsafe* products from the likes of Pfizer and Moderna, among others … you should also be researching all of those “Sudden Deaths” that have now been recurring worldwide among young and healthy people, but especially with regards to those very active athletes!

  38. If this is really enforced by airlines (what is not really the case with the current requirement), it would mean that hardly and foreigners would come to the US anymore: I don’t know anybody, who got such kind of vaccination since August 16, 2022 – maybe some elder people unlikely to travel to the US though…
    Complete nonsense, I agree.

  39. Public health officials are looking for excuses to remain relevant and maintain inflated budgets and staffs.

    Expect new and updated Covid restrictions until they find a new “emergency” to use as justification. It’s not even a conspiracy, just human nature.

    People like being relevant. And government agencies will do almost anything to avoid budget cuts.

  40. This is what you get if you chose Biden or any other democrat. Hope people will start to see the value in Trump again!

  41. The purpose of this is to further make the USA look absurd in the eyes of the rest of the world. It is also being used to prevent people and capital flight from Europe to the USA, when the Euro crashes and their banks ultimately fail. It’s a feature, not a glitch. No one is this incompetent, not even the current imbeciles in charge in the USA. You will not find a more pro-vaccination general population than you will in Europe (there is perhaps 10-15% vaccine hesitancy), and even Europe isn’t doing this.

  42. Yes, it is absurd and very frustrating for people like me whose spouse is a non US citizen. For the last two years I’ve had to travel alone with our baby to visit family and my husband can’t come just because he’s unvaccinated. In the past, they allowed spouses of citizens to enter as long as they tested for COVID.. We are hoping and praying this thing ends May 11, so he can join us here in the States.

  43. @ CuriousCat

    Gonna focus on one issue to demonstrate the idiocy of your posts, which are entire drivel (from a scientific and medical perspective).

    Actually *read* the WA report, dude, because your analysis is predicated on a profound misunderstanding at best, or absolute stupidity and conspiratorial intent at worst. Note , if your want to be an honest chap (and not a dishonest fool prone to conspiracy theories) you need to comprehend and then clarify “adverse events’ per the report which you yourself quote. So make some attempt to read the report, pay attention to the definition of terms, and take a critical look at the data.

    You what?! A localised rash is an adverse event. A headache is an adverse event. A fever is an adverse event. Oh no – WTF I’m getting a vaccine that will protect myself and vulnerable members of my community from serious illness and death and I’m running around like a gormless twat worried about a post vaccine jab and keeping themselves *safe* from a headache or localised rash that occurs at a rate of a fraction of one percent. *Snowflake* redefined thanks to the dumb right wing Americans and their insane conspiracy theories.

    If you want an adult discussion, try citing the serious adverse event data….they are orders of magnitude less.

    In the meantime, if anybody reading this blog is interested in a factual and considered position, check out the actual entry rules for non US citizen / residents wrt COVID . They continue to relate to a *primary* course of vaccinations. The dumb-right-wing-American commentariat above fails to grasp such.

  44. @Bob – funny, you don’t articulate what you believe the public health benefit is that justifies that restriction. Doing so would, of course, subject your claim to scrutiny over whether the policy actually accomplishes the goal.

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