CNN host Fareed Zakaria on Sunday implored countries across the world to implement a global vaccine passport that would require people to prove which vaccine brand and dosage they’d received.
During an appearance on “CNN Newsroom,” Zakaria said the coronavirus would never go away and that society would have to “learn to live” with it and its potential mutations. He also lamented that there was no global coordination or common standards in terms of fighting the virus before calling for “a common certificate or passport” that would document everything about an individual’s vaccination status.
“We need to fundamentally understand this thing is not going away. And so any strategy that is based on the idea that we just do one more thing and it’ll go away, that’s not what’s going to happen,” Zakaria told fellow CNN host Jim Acosta. “We are going to have to learn to live with some level of virus and some mutations in our societies, moving from a pandemic to endemic stage.”
Zakaria argued that the travel bans being instituted by President Biden and other countries against certain African nations due to growing concerns over the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus were just “band- aids” and wouldn’t help very much. He added that what needed to happen was for vaccinations and MRNA technology to be ramped up across the globe and for scientists to figure out what boosters would be needed to fight each new variant.
Acosta claimed that if travel restrictions were actually based on the risk of spreading the coronavirus, then other countries would want to ban travel to the U.S. He then asked at what point there needed to be a vaccine mandate for air travelers worldwide.
“Wouldn’t that potentially be a better measure here than arbitrarily going after one part of the world, even though the variant is around the globe at this point?” he asked.