Recap of Top Libertarian Jew Blog Entries for 2021

This time of the year is a time of reflection on what has transpired during the current calendar year. Last year, I was hoping for less craziness than there was in 2020. Between the pandemic, economic downturn, and social unrest, last year was unhinged. While 2021 was not as bad as 2020, 2021 still had more than its fair share of insanity. 

As the pandemic continued into its second year, it remained a major topic in the media and among political pundits. On my blog, the pandemic was a topic that accounted for over a third of my blog entries for the 2021 calendar year. I was hoping that it would have been less considering that safe and effective vaccines were made available (see April 2021 analysis here). There was a brief moment in which the CDC said that the unvaccinated could go around doing normal activities unmasked. My response to that CDC recommendation in May was that the CDC has botched messaging throughout the pandemic and that going back to normal means ignoring what the CDC has to say by enjoying life regardless. Maybe now, we could stop people telling us to "follow the science" while ignoring the science. That was wishful thinking on my part. 

We went from "two weeks to flatten the curve" to "wait a little longer to help hospitals" to "wait until we have a vaccine" to "get enough people vaccinated." But along came the Delta variant, and with that, the goalposts moved once more. To keep Delta in check, President Biden called for vaccine mandates. I covered the topic no less than four times this past year in which I pointed out the problems with vaccine mandates (see here, here, here, and here). 2021 was also a year in which we procured enough data to conclude that the lockdowns were both ineffective and harmful from a public health standpoint. And let's not even get into the unhelpful travel bans or mask mandates (see here and here). All of this lunacy made me realize that the pandemic will not come to an end when COVID-related hospitalizations or deaths get low enough, but when we as a society get used to accepting risk once more. 

But don't you worry. There was enough craziness to go around that the pandemic did not need to hog all the spotlight. 

• Cancel culture was another major news item. Take the Dr. Seuss controversy in which the Dr. Seuss Foundation cancelled the publication of six of Seuss' less-known works. I came to multiple conclusions on that debacle, most notably that the woke Left are the moral prudes of our time and that a small group of emotionally fragile and intellectually weak individuals should not have their sense of being offended determine what is acceptable for the rest of us. 
• In a similar vein, there was cancel culture controversy surrounding comedian Dave Chapelle's Netflix special The Closer. He made jokes offending all sorts of people, but the jokes that got the most ire were those on the theme of transgender individuals. You can read my analysis here, but I was reminded of the value of comedy, the importance of free speech, and that the fragility of the woke Left is both at odds with learning to agree with those disagree with you and the essential pillars that make up a free, democratic society. 
• In terms of economic disarray, I offered my takes on the supply chain crisis and the shortages in the labor market. 
• And let's not forget the debacle with the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. While the woke Left tried to make it about race (which is odd considering the case was about a white guy shooting four other white guys in self-defense), it showed how little many on the Left believe that there is a such thing as a "good guy with a gun." The spoiler here is that defensive gun usage (DGU) is way more prevalent than the Left would care to admit. 
• But if we do want to get into the topic of race, I tackled the topic of critical race theory (CRT). Contrary to what the Left would like to believe, CRT is not about simply about having a dialogue about race or making sure we are not ignoring the nastier parts of history. CRT is a simplistic, fatalistic worldview that believes that U.S. institutions are inherently racist and [one of] the only attributes of a human being that matters is the color of one's skin. 
• On the brighter side of race relations, Juneteenth became a federal holiday. I wrote a piece on why we should all celebrate Juneteenth in the United States.

I wish you all a Happy New Year! May it be less out of whack than 2020 and 2021 were. 

Fauci Is Dead Wrong About Indefinitely Needing Face Masks on Airplanes

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, has played a major role in advising the U.S. public on pandemic measures. He has also been off the mark on numerous occasions. Here are but a few:

• In February 2020, Fauci wrongly predicted that COVID would most probably have a fatality rate of 0.15 percent, which would have been on par with the common flu. In a matter of a few weeks, Fauci went from thinking the risk was minuscule to being supportive of lockdowns, albeit only for two weeks. It ceases to shock me how quickly "two weeks to flatten the curve" turned into months. He continued to push for strict lockdowns in the latter half of 2020. He was continually critical of states on multiple occasions that decided to open "too early." The scientific evidence ended up vindicating those states by showing that lockdowns are ineffective and harmful.
• Fauci was wrong when he thought that schools should be shut down because he went under the erroneous assumption that allowing children to go to school would be superspreader events. It turns out that the science showed that COVID is a minuscule risk to children. 
• Fauci admitted openly that his goalposts of herd immunity were not based on science, but "what the public was ready to hear." 
• His flip-flopping on masks has been astounding. In February 2020, Fauci said "there is no reason whatsoever to wear a mask." He changed his mind in April 2020 supposedly because he was worried about the supply of face masks. Fast-forward to January 2021 where he went as far as saying that even the vaccinated should wear two masks, even though Fauci admitted in May 2021 that a vaccinated person wearing two masks was tantamount to pandemic theatre. 

I could list more not-so-endearing Fauci moments, but I want to move on to Fauci's latest faux pas. This one took place on a December 19, 2021 airing of ABC's This Week (transcript here). When asked if we will reach a point where we do not have to wear face masks on airplanes, Fauci's response was "I don't think so." In Fauci's mind, those who travel on airplanes will be wearing face masks for the foreseeable future. This response is problematic for a number of reasons. 

Let's begin with the efficacy of face masks generally. The pre-pandemic understanding behind face masks was that "face masks should not be worn by healthy individuals to protect themselves from acquiring respiratory infection because there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill (Desai and Mehrotra, 2020)."

At the beginning of the pandemic (i.e., May 2020), I was mildly supportive of a temporary face mask mandate. In spite of the mixed evidence that we had at the time, I figured a temporary measure that had low costs and potentially high benefits was good advice at the beginning of the pandemic when we had less understanding of face masks in the context of COVID. I started to change my mind as the pandemic progressed. 

About one year into the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in December 2020 that "there was only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking healthy people (WHO, 2020, p. 8)." A month earlier, the revered Cochrane examined multiple studies on the transmission of influenza-like diseases and found "there is low certainty evidence from nine trials that wearing a mask may make little to no difference to the outcome of influenza-like illness (Jefferson et al., 2020)." The WHO and Cochrane findings began my process of truly questioning face masks.

I continued to be begrudgingly supportive of face masks, but then came accessible vaccines. Looking at the vaccine process and the clinical data, I found that vaccines were safe and effective. Vaccines are much less riskier than contracting COVID. By the time we reached August 2021, I wrote a piece illustrating why we do not need face mask mandates. Aside from not being significantly responsible for lower case rates, I also argued that vaccines are a way more effective tool in fighting this pandemic than face masks. We also have to factor in that vaccines greatly reduce severe COVID cases, COVID-related hospitalizations, and COVID-related deaths (Scobie et al., 2021). It makes less sense to talk about COVID cases when vaccines have further severed the relationship between cases and disease severity. 

If that were not enough, a literature review from the Cato Institute shows that, as of November 2021, the available evidence of face mask efficacy is of low quality (Liu et al., 2021a). While masks are shown to reduce some measure of droplet transmission, what has not been demonstrated with available clinical data is a correlation with infection outcomes (Liu et al., 2021b). As a fun side note, CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said earlier this week that cloth masks are little more than face decorations in the face of a variant as contagious as omicron.

More specifically, the evidence for face mask usage in airplanes is even more scant than face masks generally. The 2020 Harvard study is not based on the gold standard of randomized controlled trials, but was done through modeling. An Irish case study of an international flight to Ireland suggests that in-flight transmission was the only possible solution (Murphy et al., 2020). Here is another case study, this one being a two-hour, domestic Japanese flight (Toyokawa et al., 2020). In spite of these studies, the evidence base is still that of low certainty. The evidence base for face masks slowing COVID transmission, whether in the general sense or specifically on airplanes, is weak.

I would like to talk about the risk of contracting COVID while on an airplane. What is the risk of flying the friendly skies during this pandemic? To quote the medical journal JAMA Network from October 2020, "the risk of contracting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during air travel is lower than an office building, classroom, supermarket, or commuter train." Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly testified in front of Congress saying that high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filtration systems capture well over 99% of airborne pathogens and converts the air every two to three minutes. The aforementioned comes from a finding in a 2020 Department of Defense study showing how low-risk riding in an airplane is. How low-risk? How good of a job are HEPA filtration systems on a plane? According to the DOD study, the HEPA filtration systems do such a good job that the risk of COVID is lower than being in one's private home or being in an operating room (see Figure below). Out of all of the indoor places one can be, being inside an airplane is actually one of the safest. 

Fauci does not care about how low the risk is on an airplane. He said as much in the ABC interview by stating that "Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe masks are a prudent thing to do." Fauci is an eighty-year-old man for whom the only level of risk that is acceptable appears to be zero risk. After all, Fauci did say in that ABC interview that we cannot return back to normal until we finish this. 

Fauci does not care about how little evidence exists to support or refute mask-wearing. Fauci does not care about how mass vaccination has made COVID more manageable. He does not care that air filtration in an airplane is so high-quality that in terms of COVID-related risk, it is safer to be in in airplane than it is in an operating room. It does not matter that flying in an airplane without a mask is a low-risk activity. Fauci does not want us to go back to something resembling a pre-pandemic normal. What he cares about is fear of COVID and that we share his fear until the day we die.

Risk is a part of life. We do not have the luxury of living in a bubble and eliminating risk. Fauci analogizing the fight against COVID to fighting the Axis powers in WWII is another example of showing how out of touch he is. The U.S. government has declared a War on Terror, War on Drugs, and War on Poverty. Remind me again how well those "wars" are going. COVID is not going to go away. As I brought up in October, this pandemic will not truly end until we as a society can accept risk once more. If we cannot let up on pandemic regulations in the safest of conditions, such as wearing face masks on airplanes, what hope do we have of leaving the pandemic behind us? 

We should not give into fear. We should also not continue to push health regulations that have little to no evidence to support it, as is the case with face mask mandates. We cannot mask our way out of the pandemic. As the Cato Institute brings up, since the effectiveness of masks is uncertain, we should focus on practices that we know to be effective: vaccines, better ventilation systems, and discouraging crowding in closed areas (also see University of Minnesota review of masks here). I do not know whether President Biden will extend the face mask mandate on airplanes beyond the current mid-March expiration date. I certainly hope not. What I do know is that when government bureaucracy is entrenched with hypochondriacs, fear-mongers, and the most risk-averse who claim to follow science but effectively ignore the science, we end up in a dystopian society that values fear above else. This mentality that leads so-called experts to say we need to indefinitely wear face masks on planes to avoid the smallest of risks is no way to move forward and sure is no way to live.

Abortion Advocates Who Abandon "My Body, My Choice" By Favoring Vaccine Mandates Do So For No Good Reason

"My body, my choice." It is a mantra that has defined the modern-day feminist movement, particularly when it has come to the theme of abortion. The idea behind the mantra are the concepts of bodily autonomy and freedom of choice. I thought the idea of bodily autonomy amongst those who are pro-abortion was sacrosanct.....at least until the pandemic came along. What the phrase "my body, my choice" has taken on a different meaning in the political arena. The phrase "my body, my choice" is no longer solely used by the pro-abortion crowd. Those who are anti-mask or anti-vaccination have been using the mantra. This unsurprisingly has been a controversial move. 

The pro-abortion Left is angry at what they view as an appropriation and misuse of the phrase. To quote an article from Vogue, "For Republicans, it's a case of government regulation for thee but not for me." There is overlap between the anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers and those who are anti-abortion. It is inconsistent for those who argued against the "my body, my choice" argument in the abortion debate to use it when it comes to mask mandates or vaccine mandates. 

However, that inconsistency cuts both ways. Many who had been using the argument "my body, my choice" when it came to abortion have abandoned the idea when supporting vaccine mandates. Just to cite some examples, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was recently at a pro-abortion rally in which he said, "You cannot have the government attempt to take away your right to control your body. It cannot happen in America. We have to fight it, every one of us." This is the same Mayor de Blasio that had no problem mandating that all private-sector workers be vaccinated by December 27 of this year. 

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg opined that abortion restrictions are an "infinitely more invasive form of biopolitical control" than vaccines. Actress Whoopi Goldberg also lost it over the Supreme Court's recent abortion ruling because she takes issue when "you tell me what I need to do with my doctor and my family." Goldberg is also in support of vaccine mandates. I am not saying that everyone on the Left is for abortion and/or vaccine mandates, much like not everyone on the Right is against those policies. What I am saying is that the Left is more likely to be pro-abortion and pro-vaccine mandate.

Someone who is anti-abortion but says "my body, my choice" when arguing against vaccine mandates is just as inconsistent when someone who is pro-abortion abandons the argument "my body, my choice" for vaccine mandates. Which of these is more egregious? I would hazard to guess that a lot of that would depend on where one falls on the political spectrum. In any case, it is safe to say that political expediency plays a larger role than ideological purity or caring about the consistency or coherence of an argument. 

In spite of the political Left and political Right being inconsistent, there seems to be a fair bit of legal precedent established in recent years. The Roe v. Wade case notwithstanding, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of bodily autonomy in numerous occasions, including the purchase and use of contraceptions (Griswold v. Connecticut), not being subjected to experimental drugs or therapy without one's consent (United States v. Stanley), refusing medical treatment that can save one's life (Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health), and marrying whichever consenting adult you would like (Loving v. Virginia; Obergefell v. Hodges).   

As nice as it is to cite legal precedent, those who were previously on team "My Body, My Choice" now argue that there are exceptions. A New York Times opinion piece recently made the argument that bodily autonomy is not an absolute. So did the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU, which has traditionally defended abortion with a bodily autonomy argument, did not find the bodily autonomy argument to be compelling in the case of vaccine mandates. Why? Although the ACLU recognizes a fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make one's own health decisions, the ACLU also argues that it is not an absolute. One's right to do something, or to not do something, should not harm others. Since the ACLU views vaccine mandates as protecting others, it is what the ACLU calls a "justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity."

Arguing that freedom has limits is not new, innovative, or radical. When I wrote my 30-plus-paragraph stance a couple years ago on why I am a pro-life/anti-abortion libertarian (with caveats, to be sure), I made that very argument supporting my stance against abortion. I used what is known as the non-aggression axiom. To quote Cato Institute scholar David Boaz, "No one has the right to initiate aggression against the person or property of anyone else." The non-aggression axiom states that as long as you are not directly harming anyone else with your actions, you are free to do what you want with your life. It is an axiom because there are limits, including murder, rape, fraud, and arson. I found that abortion violates the non-aggression axiom because it takes the life of another human being. 

Much like with the numerous pandemic restrictions, "follow the science" does not mean that an experiment is conducted and out pops an answer. What the science does with any health-related policy is that it informs our decision. Beyond that, we make value judgments. In the case of abortion, gestational development informs my view on when life begins. Those who are staunchly pro-abortion draw the line at birth, whereas those who are staunchly anti-abortion draw the line at conception. 

I draw the line at the eight-week mark for two reasons. One, it has developed the human organs and other features that make it discernibly human. Two, that is the point where an embryo becomes a fetus. Abortion is not simply a choice "between a woman and her doctor." If an abortion were more analogous to removing a tumor or a cyst, I would not have a single moral or ethical qualm with abortion. However, that is not the case. The fetus is not a clump of cells or a part of the mother's body. It is a human being with a unique set of human organs and unique DNA.  Whether we decide to give a zygote or a fetus legal standing is a separate consideration from whether they are biologically human beings or not. Again, the science informs our decisions, but does not dictate an answer about abortion policy because there are ethical, moral, and philosophical considerations. 

The same goes for the vaccine mandates. There are other considerations for vaccine mandates aside from the pandemic. There are civil rights, political freedoms, and economic costs to take into account. Also, there are potential side effects from the vaccines. No medical treatment is ever going to be 100 percent. At the same time, vaccines are still very safe and effective, so much so that the risk of getting vaccinated is still significantly smaller than the risk of contracting COVID. For the vast majority of people, the risk of statistically improbable vaccine reactions is outweighed by the risk of contracting COVID and having more than a mild case. Based on available clinical data, I am for people getting vaccinated for COVID. While I am pro-vaccine, I am anti-mandate. 

The explanation for the vaccine mandates, at least the one that President Biden used, is that we need the mandates to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. The vaccines are effective at preventing severe cases of COVID, COVID hospitalizations, and COVID-related deaths. If the vaccines are effective at preventing the nastier parts of contracting COVID, then there is no need to force those who do not want the vaccine. This faulty logic is one of the many reasons I am against the vaccine mandates. 

The ACLU and others who argue for vaccine mandates do so with the assumption that the unvaccinated are much more likely to contribute to the transmission of COVID. If that assumption proves to be false, then the argument for vaccine mandates, and by extension vaccine passports, crumbles. Yes, vaccines are effective at lowering severe COVID cases, COVID-related hospitalizations, and COVID-related deaths. As for COVID transmissions, vaccines are not nearly as effective. 

• Using data from 68 countries and nearly 3,000 U.S. counties, a study from European Journal of Epidemiology found that higher vaccination rates are not associated with lower rates of COVID cases (Subramanian and Kumar, 2021). To quote the researchers, "In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people." 
• In an August 2021 interview with Wolf Blitzer, CDC Director Rachel Walensky admitted that vaccines cannot prevent COVID transmission. 
• An October 2021 article from the renowned Lancet provides insight (Wilder-Smith, 2021), saying that "the vaccine effect on reducing transmission is minimal in the context of delta variant circulation."
• Another Lancet article from October 2021 suggested that those who are vaccinated are just as likely to spread COVID to those in their household as those who are unvaccinated (Singanayagam et al., 2021).
• A preprint case study shows that the vaccinated in Wisconsin have similar viral loads, and that 68 percent of individuals infected despite vaccination tested positive for COVID (Riemersa et al., 2021).
• A case study from a federal prison found no difference in transmission between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and concluded by warning that public health officials should assume that the vaccinated who become infected are no less infectious (Salvatore et al., 2021).
• Another preprint study showed a modest effect on transmission, but that by three months, the rate of transmission for the vaccinated was comparable to the unvaccinated (Eyre et al., 2021).

The existence of breakthrough cases and how vaccines have little to no impact on transmission rates has important public policy implications. 

1. First and foremost, vaccination status does not indicate whether a person is an active threat as it pertains to COVID. This means that vaccination status should not be used as a determinant to allow or deny access to a service (e.g., restaurant, concerts, entry to a country).  
2. A vaccine mandate is not a form of collective self-defense. There is no way to prove if an individual will be responsible for disease transmission, especially given how commonplace COVID is. Not everyone who is vaccinated develops immunity. As we have seen, it is possible to transmit COVID even when vaccinated. Conversely, some unvaccinated people never become infected. Furthermore, the unvaccinated who have natural immunity seem to have greater immunity than those who only have vaccine immunity. At a minimum, this should help remove stigma against those who do not want get vaccinated.  
3. It illustrates how pointless it is to use COVID cases as a metric for pandemic severity, especially at this stage. Governments should stop using COVID cases as a metric to justify pandemic restrictions, whether that is questionable mask mandates, ineffective travel bans, or lockdowns, the latter of which shows how the cure can be worse than the disease.
4. As safe and effective as COVID vaccines are, the primary benefit incurred is not of a societal nature, but of a personal, individual nature. As such, how we define the policy goal of herd immunity needs to change accordingly. 

I want to be clear that citing the aforementioned studies does not mean people should not get vaccinated. Quite the contrary! People should get vaccinated, even those who have natural immunity because hybrid immunity (the combination of natural immunity and vaccine immunity) provides the greatest protection (e.g., Goldberg et al., 2021; Goel et al., 2021). Even so, we should be honest about what vaccines can and cannot do. Just because vaccines are not particularly effective when it comes to transmission does not negate the fact that vaccines are very effective at preventing severe COVID, COVID-related hospitalizations, and COVID-related deaths. 

However, people should not be mandated to get vaccinated. Part of being free means living with the consequences of your choices, whether those are good or bad choices. People should chose what goes into their bodies, whether we are talking about food, alcohol, nicotine products, or vaccines. I think that remaining unvaccinated is generally ill-advised. At the same time, if we are to remain a free society, then "my body, my choice" (provided that it doesn't violate the non-aggression axiom) needs to mean something. 

In this context, it means that the unvaccinated need to live with the risk and the consequences of remaining unvaccinated. If that means they are more likely to be hospitalized, then so be it. That poor life choice is on them. Or to quote Democratic Governor Jared Polis, "At this point, if you haven't been vaccinated, it's your own darn fault." We do not deny those with unhealthy lifestyles healthcare access. We also do not mandate that people quit smoking and drinking alcohol, exercise three times a week, get at least 7-8 hours of sleep a day, or eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. While health is important, we do not treat it as an absolute. We should learn to live with the risk of COVID as humanity has done with other areas of life. 

Vaccine mandates are not a "justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity," especially since vaccines do not prevent transmission in any significant way. There is no compelling case in which people should be forced to take a vaccine or lose their jobs and freedoms if they do not comply. At a minimum, I hope the courts see the folly of vaccine mandates and rule against them. Vaccine mandates do not have a place in a free society and they do not have a place in a society that ought to care about the results of scientific findings. 

Travel Bans Are Nothing More Than Harmful Public Health Theater

In the "wonderful" world of COVID fear-mongering, the World Health Organization [WHO] classified the variant B.1.1.529 of the coronavirus, also known as the omicron variant, as a "variant of concern." By the WHO's definition, a "variant of concern" is a variant that is more transmissible, more virulent, and/or more skilled at evading public health measures. The omicron variant has its origins in South Africa, although it has already been discovered in 23 other countries [as of 12/1]. In response, such countries as the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Japan decided to impose travel bans on South Africa and surrounding countries (e.g., Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho). The premise behind these travel bans are to lower the spread of COVID, or at a minimum, buy some time for the upcoming disease or variant. While this might seem like a well-thought-out idea, the truth of the matter is that they are not an effective public health measure. 

Travel Bans Are Ineffective at Preventing COVID Spread

The pre-pandemic understanding of travel bans has been that they have minimal impact, as this systematic review from the WHO on influenza-based travel bans illustrates (Mateus et al., 2014). As Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Chris Beyrer points out, travel bans during the coronavirus pandemic have been ineffective at keeping the alpha and delta variants out of multiple countries. For argument's sake, let us look at some of the research that suggests at least some effectiveness. An article from Lancet (Russell et al., 2020) found that travel bans are most effective when "there are zero or few cases in the destination country." This Lancet finding implies that a travel ban is most likely to be successful at the beginning of the pandemic. Certainly at this stage in the pandemic, travel bans lose efficacy. 

An article from Science concluded that the travel ban in Wuhan only delayed epidemic progression by a whopping three to five days (Chinazzi et al., 2020). The caveat for this negligible effect is that the travel ban would to be accompanied by a comprehensive public health response (e.g., hand-washing, social distancing, house quarantine). 

It is one thing for travel bans to theoretically work. Looking at the research, here is how it would need to work in practice. Travel bans would need to be implemented early enough before the infection rates are too high. Travel bans work as part of a more comprehensive public health response. Even if a country is coordinated enough to pull that off, travel bans do not stop the spread of a disease. As a research brief from the Cato Institute (Bier, 2020) and an article from the Journal of Emergency Management found (Errett et al., 2020), travel bans merely delay the spread of a disease. 

Travel bans have the potential to be somewhere between insignificant and mildly effective at the beginning at the pandemic, but become negligible as the pandemic progresses. The reason for that is because we reach a certain point in the pandemic, a point we certainly have reached in December 2021, where international travelers are no longer a significant contributor to overall infection incidence. It is no wonder that the WHO advised against imposing blanket travel bans from the onset of the pandemic and continues to make that recommendation.

Impeding Future Pandemic Readiness

South Africa was able to identify, reporting, and sequence the omicron genome in a relatively quick fashion. How does South Africa get "rewarded?" By having travel bans imposed on South Africa. The problem with implementing a travel ban in response is very short-sighted. Why? As National Public Radio [NPR] brings up, if another country discovers a future variant within their borders, they very likely would be disincentivized to report the variant. After all, it was China's cover-up of the initial strain that got us into this mess in the first place.

Travel bans are all the more impactful when banning countries that do not have the infrastructure or resources to implement widespread vaccination. While it might seem noble to protect one's own citizens, the truth of the matter is that the pandemic is a global one. If this issue of getting widespread vaccination to developing countries not get rectified, we will continue to see new variants crop up. Combine the discouragement of reporting with the fact that a travel ban makes it difficult to transport healthcare workers and other healthcare resources, and what you have is a recipe to prolong the pandemic. 

Harm Caused by Travel Bans

We cannot look at the benefits of the travel bans in isolation, as if COVID transmission were the only issue at play. We also need to make sure that the travel bans do not cause more harm than they are trying to prevent. Limiting travel stymies economic growth because you are cutting off multiple forms of economic activity. That is basic economics. The question is by how much. That question is tricky to answer, especially since it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the travel restrictions from the pandemic itself or from other containment efforts (e.g., lockdowns). Nevertheless, there have been some attempts to quantify the economic costs:

• In February 2020, the Cato Institute made a back-of-the-envelope estimation that a travel-and-immigration ban would cost the U.S. economy $323 billion in the first year. 
• The Canadian Government estimated that travel bans would reduce GDP from 1.2 to 1.7 percent for 2020 (Liu, 2020). 
• The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] estimated that travel bans impose an average service cost of 12 percent of export values across sectors (Benz et al., 2020).
• In July 2021, the U.S. Travel Association calculated that travel restrictions on the U.K., Europe, and Canada were costing the United States $1.5 billion per week. 
• According to the World Travel and Tourism Council [WTTC], international tourism spending dropped 69.4 percent due to ongoing travel restrictions (p. 4). Additionally, the WTTC calculated that the United States was losing $198 million a day due to travel restrictions. Assuming that figure holds for an entire calendar year, that would amount to $72.5 billion a year. 
• The World Bank detailed how earlier travel restrictions harmed those in sub-Saharan Africa, including livelihoods, food security, and lower access to education (Paci, 2021).

There is more than the economic cost. There is also the human toll taken on people who are unable to spend time with loved ones, whether it is long-distanced partners being separated, grandparents unable to see their grandchildren, being prevented from such life-cycle events as weddings and funerals, or being unable to visit a loved one that is sick in the hospital.  

Conclusion: Travel bans do not stop the spread of a disease. At best, it briefly stalls the spread of the disease. Plus, whatever effectiveness they do have takes place at the beginning of the pandemic. At this point of the pandemic, a travel ban in the hopes of stopping the omicron variant is foolhardy. It is already in multiple countries and has made its way to the United States. Its ineffectiveness makes it all the more difficult to justify the economic and emotional costs of travel bans.

Omicron is not the first variant and in all likelihood, it will not be the last variant. We are not going to reach a moment of zero-COVID. COVID is here to stay. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can move forward and reach the point where the pandemic finally becomes endemic. Instead of enacting harmful and ineffective travel bans, what we should focus on what works, (e.g., testing, domestic travel screening, vaccines). We should do our utmost to implement localized public health protocols to minimize spread of COVID while not interrupting international trade and commerce. Sadly, travel bans do neither.