President-elect Joe Biden’s spokesperson says the US will maintain travel bans on Brazil, the UK, and European countries despite President Donald Trump’s order to lift them.
The White House officials told Reuters that Trump had planned to lift the restrictions on January 26, six days after Biden takes office.
However, Biden’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki took to Twitter to say that now wasn’t the time to be relaxing travel measures.
“With the pandemic worsening, and more contagious variants emerging around the world, this is not the time to be lifting restrictions on international travel,” Psaki wrote.
She added: “On the advice of our medical team, the Administration does not intend to lift these restrictions on 1/26.
“In fact, we plan to strengthen public health measures around international travel in order to further mitigate the spread of COVID-19.”
The restrictions ban nearly all non-US citizens who have been in the UK, Ireland, Brazil, and 26 countries of the Schengen area in Europe that allow travel across open borders.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed an order requiring travelers to present a negative COVID-19 test or proof of recovery from coronavirus to enter the US starting on January 26.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson has closed the UK’s borders and all arrivals will have to isolate for 10 days regardless of where they came from.
The chair of a WHO working group on coronavirus vaccines told Science Magazine: “The not-so-good news is that the rapid evolution of these variants suggests that if it is possible for the virus to evolve into a vaccine-resistant phenotype, this may happen sooner than we like.”
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