Talk about appeasement: Bojo will allow vaccinated travelers to enter the UK without first proving they aren’t carrying Covid.

(Originally published Jan. 6 in “What in the World“) As White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci pleads in vain against mounting public complacency, Omicron is reportedly causing an increasing number of hospitalizations among one of the largest remaining groups of unvaccinated people—children. So the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has added its endorsement of boosters for 12-15 year olds to the FDA’s approval earlier this week. Italy, meanwhile, has gone a step further and made vaccination mandatory for residents over 50.

So many U.S. healthcare workers are coming down with Covid that the CDC has reduced the recommended isolation period to five days from seven. Many healthcare workers worry they’ll risk taking the virus to work with them and spreading it among patients.

But Covid has enlisted a powerful new ally in the nation that gave us our first variant, Alpha—the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will no longer require vaccinated travelers to prove the virus isn’t in their carry-on luggage. They’ll instead have to test after they’ve arrived, unpacked their bags and spread whatever new strain they’ve brought as a souvenir. Unvaccinated travelers will still have to provide a negative test.

This ignores the fact that vaccinated people are the most likely carriers of Omicron and newer strains. Vaccines have proven largely ineffective in preventing infection by Omicron, only preventing severe illness, and are only moderately useful in preventing infection by Delta. Unvaccinated people infected by Covid, meanwhile, are generally too sick to travel, so requiring them to test negative achieves virtually nothing.

What the new policy does do is turn the U.K. into an even safer harbor for Covid than it already has been. While Britain has done an admirable job rolling out vaccines and boosters, it did so only after suffering a devastating wave of Covid deaths thanks to an abortive initial “herd immunity” strategy and a broader reluctance to impose stringent social distancing measures in the first place.

Since then, it has demonstrated an astonishing lack of restraint, using its vaccine progress as an excuse to adhere to a patchwork of inconsistent measures and then prematurely relax them despite persistently high infection rates to indulge the urgent national need to become publicly intoxicated. Thanks to their collective inability to binge drink at home, Britons have done more to harbor Covid than any other large nation, giving the UK with more infections-per-capita than any other nation with a population of more than 50 million potential hosts.

Johnson justified the shift in policy by noting correctly that barring travelers has had very little impact on the unchecked growth of cases in the country. In other words, we can’t beat the virus, why not join it?

If you’re interested in reading a better explanation of why infection by Omicron isn’t the way to end the pandemic than I provided in yesterday’s diatribe, read Katherine Wu’s excellent new piece in The Atlantic, “Should I Just Get Omicron Over With?”