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Sunday, January 24, 2021
“The plane is in a tailspin”
Biden to renew Europe entry ban
In the United States there is the fear of mutations. The new president will likely reimpose the entry bans just lifted for Europeans on Monday. Biden’s designated health minister chooses a dramatic image for the faltering vaccination campaign: “The plane is down.”
According to inside information, US President Joe Biden will impose new entry bans on European and other countries on Monday in the fight against the most contagious variants of the corona virus. Those affected are non-US citizens who have stayed in Britain, Brazil, South Africa, Ireland and the EU, Reuters reports, citing representatives of health authorities who did not want to be identified. The mutation, which was first detected in South Africa, has yet to be detected in the US, but a variant found by British scientists has already been found in 20 states.
In March, under then-President Donald Trump, the United States imposed entry bans on most visitors from Europe and then, in May, on those from Brazil. Trump ordered these measures early last week to expire on Tuesday. However, the instructions of his successor Biden, in office since Wednesday, reverse this step.
Vaccination campaign: more support from Washington
After the slow start of the US vaccination campaign, Health Minister-designate Xavier Becerra promised individual states more support from Washington. “You can’t just tell the states: here is the vaccine, here are the masks, now let’s get started,” Becerra told CNN. The Biden administration sees a central problem in the fact that under Trump, the central authorities would have been in charge of distributing the vaccines in the country, but left the rest to the states.
In response to repeated questions, Becerra left open as to when all Americans would have the opportunity to receive a corona vaccine. That depends, among other things, on coordination between local and central authorities, and he doesn’t want to give a date until it has been reliably established. “The plane is down, and we have to stop it. It won’t happen overnight,” Becerra said. The Trump administration had announced the availability of vaccines for everyone in the summer. But now there are doubts about it. So far, only about 20 million Americans have been vaccinated.
Biden talks about being administered 100 million doses of vaccines in the first 100 days of his tenure. The number has been criticized in part for not being ambitious enough after the Trump administration promised a faster pace. Corona expert Anthony Fauci emphasized, however, that this was a minimal goal that could be surpassed. “That’s the floor, not the ceiling,” Fauci said on CBS TV. Fauci recently predicted that there could be some return to normalcy in the US in the fall, provided a large portion of the population can be vaccinated by then.
