Former Vice President Joe Biden’s plan to combat the coronavirus in the United States does not include a single travel ban on any foreign country and revamps welfare-dependent legal immigration to the U.S. that President Trump’s administration has sought to end.
On Thursday, Biden unveiled a series of measures to fight the coronavirus but did not include so much as a travel ban on Wuhan, China, where the virus originated and where the majority of the more than 80,000 Chinese nationals infected with the coronavirus live.
If implemented, Biden’s plan would mean that flights directly from Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan could continue as regularly scheduled into the interior of the U.S. and every major American city.
Likewise, the plan would allow for direct flights from Italy and Iran, where more than 25,000 foreign nationals are infected, to continue into the U.S.
Contrary to Trump, Biden seemingly slammed a ban on travel from Europe, though the nation’s leading health experts have said “Europe is the new China” in terms of the spread of the coronavirus.
“Banning all travel from Europe or any other part of the world may slow it, but as we’ve seen, it will not stop it,” Biden said in an address to the media on Thursday. “And travel restrictions based on favoritism and politics rather than risk will be counter-productive.”
At the same time, Biden vowed to “listen to the experts,” but Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control have continuously said that stopping travel from highly-affected countries is vital to stopping the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S.
Also part of Biden’s coronavirus plan is a provision that would revamp welfare-dependent legal immigration to the U.S. that Trump has sought to end but which federal courts have temporarily blocked.
The provision would ensure that foreign welfare-dependents are allowed to permanently resettle in the U.S. with green cards despite their financial burden on American taxpayers amid the public health crisis.
Biden’s coronavirus plan is similar to that of his 2020 Democrat opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in that both have effectively ruled out protecting American citizens by implementing travel bans. Sanders, this week, explicitly said that he would not close America’s borders even if it stopped the spread of the coronavirus.
There have been 1,422 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 38 deaths in the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.