(LifeSiteNews) — The Biden administration plans to require non-American “essential travelers” crossing into the United States to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 starting January 22 of next year, while continuing to allow illegal immigrants to enter the country regardless of their COVID status.
The Associated Press reports that the requirement will apply to non-citizen truckers, government vehicles, and emergency response officials entering the country by road or ferry. It will not yet apply to American citizens or permanent residents, who will instead be subject to more stringent testing rules.
“These requirements are another example of how impractical regulations will send safe drivers off the road” and of “how unnecessary government mandates can force experienced owner-operators and independent truckers out of business,” responded Norita Taylor, spokesperson for trucking group Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association.
The decision comes as President Joe Biden presides over a surge of illegals entering the United States and being released inside the country, following the reversal of Trump-era border policies, such as the previous administration’s third-country agreements with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to host refugees while their applications for political asylum in America were reviewed.
Estimates of illegals who have tested positive for COVID-19 after crossing the border this year range from 20 percent to more than half. Yet conservatives allege that the double-standard originates from Democrats’ view of migration from Mexico as a reliable source of new Democrat voters.
Migrants who illegally cross the U.S. southern border “will not be subject to any vaccination requirements even when released directly into the United States (where most will remain), while roughly a hundred million U.S. citizens will be subject to unprecedented vaccination requirements,” reads a lawsuit brought in September against the Biden administration by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. “This reflects an unmistakable — and unconstitutional — brand of favoritism in favor of illegal migrants.”
Meanwhile, a body of data suggests that the mass vaccination strategy for defeating COVID-19 has failed, undermining the case for the Biden vaccine mandate that is currently held up in litigation. The federal government considers more than 196 million Americans (59% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet ABC News reported in October that more Americans died of COVID-19 this year (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000), according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Vaccine hesitancy persists thanks to unaddressed concerns about the vaccines’ safety, stemming largely from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine.
Defenders stress that their development did not start from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of Operation Warp Speed was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.
While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring.
Additionally, many of the unvaccinated simply consider it unnecessary in light of significant evidence that immunity from prior COVID infection lasts longer and is more durable than immunity from vaccination, while religious and/or pro-life Americans harbor moral objections to taking something developed and/or tested with the use of fetal cells from aborted babies.
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