Joe Biden Does Not Support Vaccination Mandates For Domestic Flyers

Joe Biden
Joe Biden

As the number of Omicron variant cases continues to rise in the United States, President Joe Biden said on Friday that he remains opposed to implementing vaccine requirements for domestic air travel, but is leaving the door open to changing his mind.

Biden said he didn’t think vaccine requirements for air travel within the country were necessary “at this point.”

“I continue to rely on the scientists… right now, they’re saying no,” he said.

Joe Biden Admitted That The Fight Against The Virus Has Dragged On

While Biden admitted the fight against the pandemic has dragged on, he said “we’ve got to beat it back before we shut it down.”

“The idea that you can build a wall around America to keep any COVID from around the world out is not there,” Biden said, sounding fairly hoarse from a cold he said he got from his young grandson.

The address was originally intended to address Labor Department statistics that were released on Friday indicating that the American economy added just 210,000 last month. Economists had expected north of 570,000 new jobs, following a revised October total of nearly 550,000.

Joe Biden added that their economy was much stronger than the previous year. The nation’s unemployment rate had fallen by nearly half a percent to 4.2 percent—its lowest rate since the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of people out of work in March 2020. They were looking at the sharpest 1-year decline in unemployment levels.

The “historic drop” in the unemployment rate, as Joe Biden put it, as well as recent revisions of employment numbers—the Bureau of Labor Statistics initially estimated that only 194,000 jobs were created in September, a number that was later revised upward by more than 60 percent—has left some economists hopeful that the numbers are just off.