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.

Vaccine requirements for federal employees and federal contractors, as well as foreign air travelers to the US, end on May 11. The government is also beginning to lift injection requirements for Head Start educators, health care workers and non-citizens at US land borders.

The requirements are among the last remnants of some of the more coercive measures the federal government has taken to promote vaccination as the deadly virus raged, and their end marks the latest display of how President

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The Biden administration is moving to treat COVID-19 as a routine, endemic disease.

While I believe these vaccine mandates have had a tremendously beneficial impact, we’ve now come to a point where we think it makes a lot of sense to remove these requirements, White House COVID-19 Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said. the Associated Press on Monday.

Highly polarizing at the time and the subject of numerous legal challenges, many of which were successful, the vaccine requirements were imposed by Biden in successive waves

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as the nations vaccination rate plateaued even during the emergence of new, more transmissible variants of

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More than 100 million people at a time fell under Biden’s sweeping mandates, which he announced on September 9, 2021, as the Delta variant of the virus sickened more people than at any other time during the pandemic. Biden had ruled out such requirements before taking office in January, but began embracing them to change the behavior of what he viewed as a stubborn segment of the public who refused to get vaccinated and said they could affect the lives of others and the economy of endangered the country. recovery.

We’ve been patient. But our patience is running out and your refusal has cost us all, Biden said at the time. The unvaccinated minority can do a lot of damage, and they do.

Federal courts and Congress have already reversed Biden’s vaccine requirements for major employers and the military.

Mandates remain for many employees of the National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service and Department of Veterans Affairs, who implemented their own requirements for health personnel and others independently of the White House

will stay

as those agencies review their own requirements, the administration said.

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More than 1.13 million people in the US have died from 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.

COVID remains a problem, Jha said. But our health care system or public health resources are much better able to respond to the threat that COVID poses to our country and do so in a way that does not create problems with access to care for Americans.

He added: Some of these emergency powers are just not needed in the same way anymore.

Arcturus, a more contagious COVID subvariant, growing in LA County, seen in sewage

According to the CDC, more than 270 million people in the US, or just over 81% of the population, have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

For more than a year, U.S. health officials have been looking at a long-term response to COVID-19 more akin to dealing with the flu, with annually updated injections targeting the latest strains of the virus, particularly the most vulnerable. But fewer than 56 million people in the US, or 17% of the population, have received a dose of the updated bivalent boosters that became available in September 2022 and provide better protection against the Omicron variants that remain in circulation.

“We don’t have a national mandate for flu vaccines in the same way, and yet we’re seeing pretty good adoption of flu vaccines,” Jha said. The goal here is really to continue to encourage people to get vaccinated, but I don’t think there will be a need for mandates in the future to get Americans vaccinated against COVID.

As federal mandates expire, Jha predicted that some employers, especially medical facilities, could decide to keep their COVID-19 vaccination requirements. He noted that the hospital where he practices had required a flu vaccine for employees for 20 years.

Jha dismissed concerns that ending the vaccination requirement for international travelers would increase the risk of a new variant entering the US from abroad Biden has already rolled back virus testing requirements for both US citizens and foreign travelers to the US

Jha said the US was already protected by a traveler genomic surveillance program, which tests for different strains of virus in airplane wastewater, for example.

We think we are much better placed to identify if a new variant emerges in the United States and respond effectively, he said. And I think that makes the need for a vaccine mandate for travelers less necessary at this point.

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