Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said Monday that he doesn’t anticipate the United States will implement additional travel restrictions even if the Omicron variant proves worse than previous strains of Covid-19.
President Joe Biden announced last week that the US would restrict travel from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi in response to the new and potentially more transmissible coronavirus variant first identified by South African scientists. Several other nations have followed suit in restricting travel from southern Africa nations.
Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday whether he expects more travel restrictions should Omicron prove to be more contagious and deadly, Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, replied, “I don’t think so, Jake.”
“I think what was done about the restrictions from South Africa and neighboring countries was merely because when the information came out about the molecular makeup of this virus with all of the mutations that were of concern, we felt that we needed to do something right away,” Fauci, the long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Tapper on “The Lead.”
“Hopefully those restrictions are not going to be a very long duration until we get a handle as to what’s going on. But we do not anticipate any further restrictions,” he added.
Fauci also said that the travel restrictions are not going to have much of an impact “in the big picture of whether (the Omicron variant) gets here or not.”