Novak Djokovic may be the greatest tennis player to ever play the game, and just won his 7th Wimbledon title, but he likely won’t be playing in the coming US Open because he is unvaccinated. The United States continues to ban unvaccinated legal travelers into its borders, even though countries like the United Kingdom and France have long since dropped this requirement. Djokovic did attempt to play in the Australian open, and even landed in the country with a tennis racket, but was quickly deported after it was decided making an exception for the world’s greatest tennis player would make the Australian government look bad.
I actually agree with the US and Australian government on the matter of making exceptions for special people. The rules should be equally applied to everyone. But I do think this particular rule targeting the unvaccinated in July 2022 is dumb for everyone. Before the coronavirus arrived on US shores, the unanimous agreement among public health and infectious disease experts was that travel restrictions were a waste of time. No less than Harvard public health experts quoted research about the failure of travel restrictions to stop the flu virus when arguing against wacky Republicans that demanded travel restrictions from Ebola hotspots in 2014. The current President even chided President Trump as late as March of 2020 for “stoking fear and stigma” by demanding travel restrictions for Ebola in 2014.
Fast forward to July 2022 and we live in a completely different world. COVID is everywhere. The plan to lockdown until bad countries could have large outbreaks to get a vaccine did work to reduce mortality and morbidity from the virus for a time, but completely failed to contain the virus because it turns out that the vaccines we have are much less efficient at stopping viral transmission than originally hoped for. It seems pretty clear that the public health community was banking on a vaccine that would extinguish the virus. In fairness, that is what appeared to be happening from the original description of the vaccine as it related to the original strain of the Sars-COV2 virus. This was what was behind recommendations from the CDC to no longer require masks for the vaccinated. Unfortunately, as the months passed it became obvious that the vaccine was not able to stop reinfection or transmission. This is driven home by a recent letter to the Editor in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the patterns of viral shedding in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals infected with the omicron variant of COVID. The following figures show viral shedding after an acute infection of the virus in vaccinated, boosted, and unvaccinated individuals over time.
The shaded regions represent the 95% confidence interval for the three curves, and show a marked degree of overlap between the three groups which means there is markedly little difference in viral shedding amount or duration between the three groups. This is a small study, but if accurate, supports the contention that vaccines, at most offer personal protection to the individual from severe disease, and don’t offer much in the way of protection to the general public. This will be music to the ears of proponents of forever masking with n95s and respirators (that’s a different topic that requires psychiatrists to weigh in on), but should also destroy the case for treating the vaccinated and unvaccinated differently when it comes to things like travel restrictions.
There are a few other issues here of course. COVID is already everywhere, and the CDC rates the entirety of the United States as having “High” community transmission. Even if there is some difference in vaccinated and the unvaccinated with regards to transmission risk, should we be protecting the US from Djokovic, or Djokovic from the US ?
Also hilariously, the US Open does not have a vaccine mandate, and so Americans that are unvaccinated will be playing tennis. To add to the idiocy, Djokovic actually was infected with COVID in the past. While the public health community largely seems to ignore the protection from severe disease afforded by a prior infection in all their recommendations to avoid confusing the public about the benefits of vaccination, it is a generally accepted concept in infectious disease that recovery from a prior disease confers some protection from serious illness if infected again.
To summarize: US COVID policy today means that an elite athlete who has recovered from COVID cannot travel to a country that is chockfull of COVID to play tennis because he refuses to take a vaccine that may not even reduce viral transmission.
The whole episode should leave everyone wondering who exactly is making COVID policy for the United States today.
Anish Koka is a Cardiologist. Follow him on twitter @anish_koka
one thing wrong here is that australia didnt make an exemption for a special person
Prior infection within 3 months allowed you to travel into australia. They did the opposite to him, they deported him bcos he is a special person. Sick bunch of people