In remarks on Tuesday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), discouraged countries from enacting travel bans on African countries that had contributed to identifying the new “Omicron” variant of COVID-19.
President Joe Biden banned people entering America last week from South Africa, the country that first alerted the WHO to the existence of the variant, as well as several other nations in the region. This was the same hypocrite Joe Biden who slammed a similar ban enacted by then-President Donald Trump as “hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”
Tedros, himself from east Africa, called the Biden-style bans “blunt” and urged countries to reconsider. He lamented that countries like South Africa and Botswana were “being penalized by others for doing the right thing.”
On Wednesday, addressing a special World Health Assembly session regarding the pandemic, Tedros demanded of world governments that they “end this pandemic”: “Just in the past week, this virus has demonstrated that it will not simply disappear. How many more lives and livelihoods it takes is up to us,” Tedros asserted. “Ending the pandemic is not a matter of chance; it’s a matter of choice.”
But he did not mention travel restrictions, instead urging WHO member countries to “achieve our targets of vaccinating 40 percent of the population of every country by the end of this year, and 70 percent by the middle of next year.”
This is the same World Health Organization and the same executive director that also initially claimed COVID-19 was not contagious among humans
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has issued the most scathing condemnation of the Biden travel ban, complaining in a speech on Sunday that the bans are “not informed by science” and will do nothing to stop the Omicron variant from spreading.