Simon Ateba is Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa covering President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. government, UN, IMF, World Bank and other financial and international institutions in Washington and New York.
United States Senator Rand Paul on Sunday criticized the travel ban President Joseph R. Biden Jr. imposed on eight African nations last month over the Omicron variant of COVID-19, saying that “the travel bans aren’t going to work.”
Senator Randal Howard Paul, an American physician who has been serving as a senator from Kentucky since 2011, asserted that “there’s no travel ban that’s going to stop this.”
“The travel bans aren’t going to work. The new variant is in over half of the states in our country. It’s in 40 different countries. There’s no ban that’s going to stop this,” Paul said on Sunday during an interview with John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM.
He said “the restrictions on our liberties” were not based on science but “based on whims.” he added that the Omicron variant may even turn out to be a blessing in disguise. “We don’t even yet know whether it’s a good or a bad thing. And if it turns out that it’s much less dangerous, and it crowds out the delta variant, it might be a blessing in disguise,” he said.
“They’re based on basically Facui’s impulse to authoritarianism is what I call it,” Paul said referring to President Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci. “His gut reaction – his immediate knee jerk reactions to everything is to take away your liberty. I mean, look, all they had to hear was a sniff of this new variant from South Africa. And they’re freaking out with all the new things they’re going to require you to do.”
Dr. Fauci and Paul have clashed many times, and Paul has called on Fauci to be fired and claiming that he should have served a five-year prison sentence for allegedly lying to Congress over whether gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute received funding from the National Institute of Health. Wuhan is where COVID-19 was first detected in China before spreading to the rest of the world.
Dr. Fauci has rejected Paul’s criticisms, arguing that he bears no responsibility for the pandemic. he even called Paul’s claims “egregiously incorrect.”
President Biden’s travel ban has been criticized by health experts and politicians in the United States and abroad. Several countries are also retaliating against the travel bans imposed by the United Kingdom and others over the new variant.
On Sunday, reports said Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is planning to impose travel restrictions on Canada, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and the United Kingdom in retaliation for their own travel bans on Nigeria over the Omicron variant.
Nigerian news outlets quoted the Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, as saying in a leaked audio message that the decision to ban the four countries in retaliation for their own bans on Nigeria would be made by the Presidential Steering Committee (PSC) on COVID-19 latest on Tuesday December 14, 2021.
Sirika was quoted as saying in the leaked audio message, “There is a case of Saudi Arabia, which put Nigeria on the banned list – no visa, no travel, et Cetra. So also Canada. So, today, there was a meeting, I participated in a zoom meeting, COVID-19 task force, just for your information also.
“We have given our input in aviation, it is not acceptable by us and we recommend that those countries – Canada, the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina be also put on Red List, as they did similarly to us.
“If they don’t allow our citizens to go into their countries who are their airlines coming to pick from our country?
“So, I am very sure that in the next few days, between now and Monday, or perhaps Tuesday, at maximum, all those countries will be put on the red list from the PSC (Presidential Steering Committee) from the task force of COVID-19. Once they are put on the red list, which means they are banned, of course, their airlines will be banned.
“I’m so sorry, we are going through a difficult moment, but we have to do it in the interest of our country.”
The Nigerian Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed has also condemned the travel bans on Nigeria, describing them as discriminatory, punitive, indefensible and unjust.
The United Kingdom imposed travel restrictions on Nigeria to stem the spread of the Omicron variant that was already in Europe before Nigeria. Under the new restrictions, travelers from Nigeria must quarantine in a hotel for 10 days to reportedly limit the spread of the Omicron variant.
UK and Irish citizens arriving from Nigeria must isolate in a government-approved facility for 10 days and receive two negative PCR tests before they can venture out.
At least 13 countries have also barred travelers from the United Kingdom from entering their countries over the Omicron variant.
A temporary travel ban was also imposed on all non-UK and non-Irish citizens and residents who have been to Nigeria in the last 10 days.
Saudi Arabia and Nigeria also banned travelers from Nigeria, Egypt, and Malawi over the Omicron variant.
In the United States, President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s travel ban on eight African nations over the Omicron variant has also been condemned as being “counterproductive,” according to Dr. Michael Osterholm, a Regents Professor who is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of The New York Times bestseller “Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer germs.”
Asked by Peter Bergen, a CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University, whether President Biden’s November 26 travel ban on South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia, Lesotho, and Eswatini, was helpful, Dr. Osterholm responded. “No. The new variant was all around the world in the month of November.”
He acknowledged that although the Omicron variant is said to be highly infectious, a travel ban “is something that nations might do initially just to lock things down while they understand what’s going on — it is not meant to be a long-term solution.”
“It’s like police at a crime scene,” he said. “They lock it down for several hours to gather information and then open it back up again. The political reaction of implementing a travel ban is not helpful in most cases. If it gives you 24 to 36 hours to at least get a lay of the land about what’s happening, then I think it can be useful. But if it persists after that, particularly when you have widespread transmission of the virus in other parts of the world already, it’s counterproductive.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm, who estimated back in April 2020 that there could be 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States within 18 months, has joined a long list of health and medical experts who have asserted that the travel ban on only African nations when the Omicron variant was already in many parts of the world is not helpful.
His prediction on fatalities in the United States has become a reality, as more than 793,000 Americans have died from the disease in the past one year and a half.
“I based my estimates at the time on historic data from previous pandemics,” he told CNN. “What is troubling to me is our fascination with modeling. I think modeling, particularly when it’s erroneous, can be very detrimental. I’ve watched so many different estimates of case numbers from these models taken literally by policymakers and the public and particularly the media. The reality is you can’t model beyond 30 days out. Just look at what is happening right now. We can’t even predict why these surges occur or when they occur. Who, 30 days ago, could have developed a model that would accurately predict what we’re seeing right now with Omicron? Who could have predicted that?”
Late last month, Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor and Dean of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, USA, had a clear message for G7 leaders: “Forget about the travel bans, let’s go vaccinate the African people.”
Dr. Hotez was reacting to the emergence and spread of the Omicron COVID-19 variant in southern Africa and the travel restrictions that many countries and regional bodies, including the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan and others, imposed on southern African nations.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on November 26 designated the B.1.1.529 variant a ‘variant of concern’ and named it ‘Omicron’, after skipping two Greek letters ‘Nu’ and ‘Xi’ to avoid confusion and controversy.
The WHO said the Omicron variant has a large number of mutations and this could be an indication of how the variant would behave. It added that it was too early to know exactly how the new variant will behave and that studies were being carried out.
Dr. Hotez told CNN’s Jim Acosta that he solution was vaccinations, not travel bans, explaining that travel bans have not been very effective against COVID-19 which was first detected in China before spreading to the entire world.
Experts at the WHO have also said travel bans have not been helpful during this pandemic and called on countries to lift them.
But more than 70 countries, including the United States have maintained the bans on only African nations, including in countries where the variant has not even been detected.
The President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned the travel bans on South Africa and other African nations, and the United States Nations Secretary General compared them to “apartheid.”
Yet, President Biden and the White House have continued to claim that the bans were necessary, asserting that they listened to the advice of their health and medical experts.
Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci, President Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor, has acknowledged in several interviews that banning countries with no single cases of the new variant may not have been based on science. Yet, the travel ban has remained in place.