What is the single dumbest government response to the coronavirus? There is, we can all agree, a crowded field competing for that distinction. But there is surely no policy so self-defeating, so needlessly harmful, so absurd in its own terms as the Biden administration’s continuation of the travel ban from selected nations.
The man who promised that the United States would reengage with allies has cut it off from the world. The candidate who pledged, before the presidential election, to “shut down the virus, not the country,” has shut down the country. And the president who boasts of following the science isn’t even pretending to base his crackdown on data.
The travel bans are arbitrary, expensive, immoral, and unscientific. They are perhaps the supreme example in the U.S. today of how bureaucratic inertia drives policy long after any notional rationale has passed.
The restrictions were imposed, let us recall, at the start of last year, when not much was known about the coronavirus and when trying to keep it out of the country still seemed a plausible option. As things turned out, that was never going to happen. The virus has reached every nation, with only New Zealand more or less managing to hold it at bay.
But in the early months of 2020, that was not yet obvious. Travel restrictions were slapped on places where COVID-19 seemed to have taken hold. Inward travel, other than for U.S. citizens, was banned from China in January 2020, from Iran in February, and then, as infections spread, from the European Union, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and South Africa.
And there it stayed.
This policy is by now so risibly illogical that it is hard to know where criticism should begin. As I write, the country with the highest infection rate in the world is Seychelles, and the country with the highest proportionate fatality rate is Peru. Neither of them is on the banned list. But Sweden and Denmark, where the disease was contained successfully and the economy is fully open, remain on it.
I cannot fly directly to the U.S. from Britain, where 65% of the population, including 80% of the adult population, has been vaccinated. But I could come via Mexico, where only 31% has been vaccinated. The figure in the U.S., by the way, is 54%.
Yet restrictions remain stubbornly in place, like those Bordeaux wine classifications that reflect the rankings as they stood in 1855. Why? Because no one can be bothered to reopen the question? Because nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program? Because there’s a chunk of the population that, as former President Donald Trump understood, quite likes the idea of closed borders, not as a contingent response to a pandemic but as a desirable end in itself?
Whatever the explanation, the White House is evidently in no hurry. On Wednesday, a spokesperson mused about putting together a new system in due course: “We are exploring considering vaccination requirements for foreign nationals traveling to the United States.”
Exploring? In most of Europe, proof of vaccination is all you need for entry. A few countries, including the U.K., also require a negative test before you board the flight. But no other developed country imposes a total ban, with all the implications for lost trade, divided families, and general nuisance.
Frankly, I’d scrap even the remaining European-style travel restrictions. Vaccines were conceived as a way of slowing the spread, but we now know that all three authorized versions, Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, are extremely good at preventing hospitalization, but only moderately good at preventing transmission. In other words, the original justification — get the shot to protect other people — is much weaker. Measures designed to slow the spread of a new disease are not appropriate to an endemic virus.
But I accept that a full return to the pre-2020 regime isn’t yet on the cards. Around the world, as I glumly predicted in these pages at the start, governments have been slow to return powers that they seized on a supposedly emergency basis. But, at the very least, might America now adopt the same sorts of rules that everyone else has? If proof of vaccination isn’t enough, add a negative test requirement, similar to the U.K. Heck, it can even insist on quarantine for the unvaccinated. But for heaven’s sake, America, come back to the party.
Other countries are eating your lunch, gladly signing deals with rival companies sited in more open jurisdictions. Meetings and conferences are being relocated, tours canceled. Accusations of isolationism, which have been leveled with increasing anger since the Afghanistan fiasco, seem vindicated in the most literal way. Come, cousins: We miss you.
