WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – A Democratic member of Congress has introduced legislation to ban unvaccinated American citizens from flying.
The legislation, if passed, would “direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that any individual traveling on a flight that departs from or arrives to an airport inside the United States or a territory of the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID–19.”
While someone who has received two doses of vaccination may breathe a sigh of relief, the latest push for regular booster shots could bar even vaccinated people from boarding a flight.
The legislation, from Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, specifies “fully-vaccinated” to mean someone who has received “all recommended doses of a COVID–19 vaccine.”
His bill has an exception for “an individual who is ineligible or medically unable to be fully vaccinated against COVID–19,” but contains no language about religious or philosophical objections.
The legislation has only one co-sponsor so far, Democratic Rep. Ed Case of Hawaii. Only half of the island state’s population have been fully vaccinated. This means if the legislation is passed and signed into law, half of Hawaii residents would not be able to travel to the mainland unless they took a boat.
Torres has previously criticized the “limitations” of voluntary vaccinations and said they “will only take us so far.”
“The [Transportation Security Administration] never allows people to enter planes or airports with a weapon, and the delta variant is a weapon,” Torres told the New York Daily News. “It is a threat to everyone in an airport and everyone on a plane.”
According to one pilot, however, COVID does not spread significantly among people on a plane, due to the quality of air filters that capture 99.9 percent of virus particles.
“The other thing to note is aircraft air is replaced at a rapid rate,” Brett Manders told Business Insider. “If you filled the aircraft with green smoke for demonstration purposes, it would be all 100-percent clear within two minutes.”
The legislation will likely have the support of at least one former Obama administration official.
“While flying, vaccinated people should no longer carry the burden for unvaccinated people,” former Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs Juliette Kayyem wrote in an August essay for The Atlantic. She acknowledged that vaccine transmission rates are low on planes, but wants to keep unvaccinated people from potentially spreading it to where they travel.
“Flying is not a right, and the case for restricting it to vaccinated people is straightforward: The federal government is the sole entity that can regulate the terms and conditions of airline safety,” Kayyem wrote.
She said that “although air-filtration systems and mask requirements make transmission of the coronavirus unlikely during any given passenger flight, infected people can spread it when they leave the airport and take off their mask. “
“Beyond limiting the virus’s flow from hot spots to the rest of the country, allowing only vaccinated people on domestic flights will change minds, too,” Kayyem said. She pointed to polling that showed coercive measures would get some people to take the jab.
Kayyem also criticized “conservative critics” of vaccine mandates. Instead, she said “institutions are shifting burdens to unvaccinated people—denying them access to certain spaces, requiring them to take regular COVID-19 tests, charging them for the cost of that testing—rather than imposing greater burdens on everyone.”
Her and Torres’ plan could run into political issues that may prevent even sympathetic Democrats from getting onboard, however—such as the fact that less than 25 percent of all black citizens and a similar proportion of Latino citizens are considered “fully vaccinated” as of August 18.
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