The Biden administration will allow all international travelers to enter the US as long as they have received any vaccine authorized by the World Health Organization, even the relatively untested Chinese-made Sinovac and Sinopharm jabs, from November 8.
Joe Biden, the US president, on Monday, signed a presidential proclamation detailing the country’s new international travel rules, which will replace the patchwork of blanket bans that have been in place since the beginning of the pandemic.
The proclamation was accompanied by a set of detailed instructions for airlines, which will be expected to enforce the new vaccine mandates.
Under the rules, which will take effect in two weeks’ time, anyone who has been inoculated with one of the seven vaccines authorized by the WHO will be allowed to enter the US by land or air.
They include the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, which were developed in China, despite the lack of data about their effectiveness against the Delta variant of the coronavirus.
Travelers will also be allowed to have received “mix and match” jabs, using one dose from one vaccine manufacturer and a second from another.
Children under the age of 18, people with allergies to any of the vaccine ingredients and visitors from countries where less than 10 percent of the population has been vaccinated will all be exempt from the new mandate.
The White House on Monday said 50 countries had vaccination rates falling below the 10 percent threshold. Data collated by the Financial Times shows these countries are mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
A senior administration official said the guidelines had been drawn relatively broadly to encourage as much vaccine take-up as possible.