The US government will scrap vaccine mandates for federal employees and international travellers next week.
The Biden Administration announced Monday night that these mandates will go by the wayside starting May 11, when the Covid-related public health emergency ends.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also announced that the requirements will be scrapped for remaining educators and federally funded health systems still subject to conditions.
‘We are in a different phase of our response to Covid-19 than we were when many of these requirements were put into place,’ the Biden admin said in a statement.
‘These measures are no longer necessary,’ it continued.
The measures finally align the US with the rest of the world.
Very few countries, such as Angola and Indonesia still require visitors to have received a Covid vaccine to gain entry.
The White House cited the statistics showing that since January 2021, Covid deaths have dropped by 95 percent, and hospitalizations are down nearly 91 percent.
Recent studies have shown the vaccines, while able to prevent hospitalization and death, are not as effective against transmission of the virus.
A 2022 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that after 25 weeks, the protection the Pfizer vaccine gave to recipients against Omicron infection fell to just nine percent.
A booster shot initially raised this protection to 67 percent before dropping to 45 percent after two weeks.
Experts have previously slammed decisions to keep Covid-era policies in place as ‘out of step’ with the rest of the world.