May 2nd - US finally drops Covid vaccine rule for foreign visitors
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
International travellers will no longer need to demonstrate to airlines that they have received Covid jabs from Friday 12 May.
Florida’s theme parks, Manhattan’s restaurants and California’s road trips are now on the summer agenda for British travellers who have not been vaccinated against the virus.
The rule will expire at the end of the day on Thursday 11 May – which is when America’s “Covid-19 public health emergency” officially ends.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and my goodness, |
| 0:09.1 | it is quite an exciting day. |
| 0:10.9 | You know, a very exciting day because finally, 18 months after the US said you can come back into the US, but you're all going to have to be fully jabbed. |
| 0:24.5 | Well, we now have learned overnight that the insistence on COVID jabs for international travelers |
| 0:32.6 | is going to be ditched from Friday the 12th of May. |
| 0:38.9 | That means, of course, you will be able to get back to the Florida sunshine, |
| 0:42.8 | to your California Highway, to your museums, restaurants, clubs in New York City, |
| 0:49.9 | and, of course, the vast and wonderful country in between. |
| 0:54.8 | I want to just explain exactly what is happening |
| 0:58.6 | and then try to put it into some kind of international context. |
| 1:04.7 | So America and COVID have behaved very strangely. |
| 1:10.0 | You will probably be aware that actually an awful lot of America was open for an awful lot of time during COVID. |
| 1:17.6 | And some parts of the US reported absolutely their best ever years, as Americans stayed at home and travelled widely within the US. |
| 1:28.8 | Places like Florida almost were COVID deniers with very, very few rules. |
| 1:35.0 | And yet, almost as soon as the COVID crisis began in March 2020, if anybody can remember that far back. President Trump said, right, |
| 1:49.8 | British travellers, EU travellers, loads of other travellers. We don't want your sort |
| 1:55.6 | coming here because we know that you are just coming from places where the virus is rife. |
| 2:02.9 | So please keep out. |
| 2:09.6 | Well, not please. Actually, they didn't add that at all. Then, Joe Biden took over, of course, |
| 2:37.4 | in January 2021. And at that stage, yes, COVID was still awful. You might recall that the UK had a 19-week ban on international travel. So there was kind of not much happening there. But by the summer of that year, when finally we were allowed to travel again, the US still hadn't opened to British travellers. That happened only on the 8th of November 2021. I know that for a fact because I was |
| 2:43.8 | queuing up at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara, crossing over from Canada to get into the US the minute it opened. |
| 2:54.5 | But even then, and for the past 18 months, the Americans have insisted on having full vaccination. |
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