Skywatcher wrote:Picking on international air travelers (oh those non caring, selfish beachgoers!) is way easier than taking a hit for a grossly inadequate vaccine roll-out for our Federal government. Distraction 101.
Sorry no that is baseless misinformation, I disagree with that statement.
First i take issue with the statement that it is the governments fault for vaccine shortages.
Makers of COVID-19 vaccines need everything to go right as they scale up production to hundreds of millions of doses -- and any little hiccup could cause a delay. Some of their ingredients have never before been produced at the sheer volume needed. This takes time.
And seemingly simple suggestions that other factories switch to brewing new kinds of vaccines can't happen overnight.
The multiple types of COVID-19 vaccines being used in different countries all train the body to recognize the new coronavirus, mostly the spike protein that coats it. But they require different technologies, raw materials, equipment and expertise to do so.
The two vaccines authorized so far, from Pfizer and Moderna, are made by putting a piece of genetic code called mRNA -- the instructions for that spike protein -- inside a little ball of fat.
Making small amounts of mRNA in a research lab is easy but prior to this, nobody made a billion doses or 100 million or even a million doses of mRNA.
the world also simultaneously has to keep up production of vaccines against polio, measles, meningitis and other diseases that still threaten even in the midst of the pandemic.
So unless every household across the world had their own private lab to produce vaccines for each other, we and governments have to wait . Everyone has to wait. Its no ones fault vaccines cannot be manufactured fast enough to vaccinate more people.
Second,
Travel restrictions have clear benefits when there are zero or few cases in the destination country. For instance, restrictions on travellers from Wuhan, or China more generally, in early 2020 might have contributed to slowing the global spread of covid-19. However, once case numbers within a country are sufficiently large that local outbreaks have been established and are self-sustaining, travel restrictions become less effective. For instance, the ban on European travellers to the USA on March 12, 2020, was too late to prevent a large epidemic in New York already seeded mainly by European travellers.
Countries with established epidemics attempting to reduce COVID-19 incidence through stringent physical distancing measures such as lockdowns might impose travel restrictions to accelerate the reduction of new cases.
However, this would only be effective if the number of cases being imported from international travellers contributes substantially to overall incidence.
Hence, decisions around travel restrictions are complex; they need to take into account local transmission, COVID-19 prevalence in source countries of travellers, and the volume of travel from those countries.
cite:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanp ... 68-2667(20)30263-2/fulltext
