The government is also beginning the process of lifting shot requirements for Head Start educators, healthcare workers, and noncitizens at U.S. land borders.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will end most of the last remaining federal COVID-19 vaccine requirements next week when the national public health emergency for the coronavirus ends, the White House said Monday.
“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 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha told The Associated Press on Monday. “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” Biden said at the time. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | Omny Studio Over 1.13 million people in the U.S. 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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That was the lowest weekly death toll from the virus since March 2020.
"We don’t have a national mandate for flu vaccines in the same way, and yet we see pretty good uptake of flu vaccines," Jha said. “The goal here really is to continue to encourage people to get vaccinated, but I don’t think mandates are going to be necessary for getting Americans vaccinated against COVID in the future.”
Jha said the U.S. was already protected by a traveler genomic surveillance program, which, for instance, tests for different virus strains in aircraft wastewater.
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