Biden Says He’ll Decide on Vaccine Requirement for Domestic Travel When Medical Team Recommends It

President Joe Biden will decide whether or not to require COVID-19 vaccination for people traveling within the United States when he gets a recommendation to impose such a requirement from his medical team.

Asked about the possibility of a mandate to travel inside the country, Biden told reporters on Tuesday in Delaware that he’d decide “when I get a recommendation from the medical team.”

A day earlier, Biden declined to say whether he supported requiring vaccination to travel within the United States and during the first week of December, Biden said there wouldn’t be a mandate for domestic travel “at this point.” He also said recently that his team had advised him that such a requirement was not necessary.

But Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s top medical adviser, said this week that the government should consider requiring vaccination for domestic air travel.

“When you make vaccination a requirement, that’s another incentive to get more people vaccinated. If you want to do that with domestic flights, I think that’s something that seriously should be considered,” Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an appearance on MSNBC.

Another top adviser to Biden, though, said Tuesday that officials were not “revisiting” the matter.

“Right now, what we’re talking about is ways to get people vaccinated. Certainly, domestic flights has been a topic of conversation, but that is not something we’re revisiting right now,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on NPR.

U.S. officials have repeatedly during the pandemic imposed restrictions that they initially said weren’t needed, including masking requirements and vaccine mandates.

Fauci said during an appearance on CNN late Monday that people shouldn’t expect a vaccination requirement for domestic air travel, at least for now.

“When I was asked that question, I gave an honest answer. It’s on the table, and we consider it. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. I doubt if we’re going to see something like that in the reasonably foreseeable future,” he said.

The proposed requirement has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups and others. Matt Welch, editor at large at Reason, a libertarian magazine, wrote that mandating vaccination for domestic travel “would almost certainly necessitate the creation of a single national vaccine database” and would likely lead to more flight delays and cancellations.

Zachary Stieber

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Zachary Stieber covers U.S. news and stories relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is based in Maryland.

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