Few cheap political hacks deserve to be hoist on the petard of their own rhetoric more than Joe Biden, so it's fun to see him called a racist for imposing "travel apartheid" on Africa, as the U.N. Secretary-General put it - but why should we treat travel bans as illogical?
We're told travel restrictions are nonsensical because "Omicron is already here" - but why is it unreasonable to restrict travel from places suffering major outbreaks, reducing the number of additional infections entering the country? What happened to "flattening the curve?"
What happened to "If it saves just one life?" Every case of this ostensibly super-dangerous variant prevented from infecting Americans is potentially saving lives. Total case numbers are constantly invoked as a crisis metric, so why not reduce cases with travel restrictions?
No matter how many cases are "already here," no matter how much the latest variant has "already spread," reducing total cases by restricting travel from outbreak zones would help a little. Are we supposed to view every measure as completely useless if it's not 100% effective?
This, by the way, is why the people running Joe Biden discarded everything the old fool said on the campaign trail to impose African travel bans in a blind panic. They need to keep number of cases down because the persistence of coronavirus is hurting his poll numbers.
All that silly bullshit about travel bans being racist and xenophobic was fine when Biden was the challenger blindly attacking Trump, but now that Biden is the one paying a political price for case surges, he throws down travel bans faster than a cowboy pulling his six-gun.
It wasn't long ago that Biden's handlers were talking about restricting travel INSIDE the U.S. Remember that? Vaccine passport checkpoints on state borders? Back when ignorant lefties were pretending case surges were caused by the policies of Republican governors?
The more reasoned argument against travel bans, which some African officials are making right now, is that the cost outweighs the benefits. The damage to lives and livelihoods, to both individuals and tottering regional economies, would be far greater than the reduction in cases.
But Covid-opportunist politicians can't very well make THAT sort of argument, because our panic-weary American electorate might start asking the same cost-benefit questions about other coronavirus measures they want to impose, and the ruinous policies they already inflicted.
The last thing our political class wants right now is for people to start thinking, "Is the cost of this virus-fighting measure worth the benefits?" Hell, they might start asking that about OTHER government policies too - and then where would our Leviathan State be? /end
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