The United States government has created a travesty by disallowing tennis great Novak Djokovic from entering the country for the U.S. Open because he hasn’t taken a vaccine against COVID-19.
Or, to be more precise, the vaccine requirement for anybody, not just Djokovic, has become absurd. The overall travel restriction should be lifted. But even if it isn’t, President Joe Biden should issue an exemption for Djokovic because Djokovic’s particular circumstances make it ludicrous to think he threatens anybody else’s health.
What makes it even more absurd is that a year ago, even when the pandemic was raging in a particularly deadly way, Biden was refusing to require illegal border crossers to get vaccinated. (That policy, with a tweak or two, apparently persists.) So people who, by definition, are breaking our laws, misnamed by Biden as “refugees,” could ignore our health requirements when thousands of people were dying daily. But a famously fit, legal visitor, one with a degree of national immunity because he already had the coronavirus, cannot enter for a major national event at a time when most of the worst dangers of the virus have long been mitigated.
Even for those of us who all along have been “moderate restrictionists” — meaning we thought anti-COVID measures nationwide were far too stringent but that the right-wing ideological frenzy against virtually all restrictions was deadly — it is obvious that after 30 months, every sentient person knows how to protect himself from the worst of COVID-19, and that the severity of the virus in most cases is now lessened.
There appears to be no good reason for a blanket policy excluding all otherwise legal travelers merely because they haven’t been vaccinated. And, if government worrywarts insist on a blanket policy, it should at least treat a certified prior infection as the equivalent of vaccination because both appear to offer similar levels of protection against a new infection.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent restatement of its ban on nonvaccinated travelers notes that “[only] limited exceptions apply.” Well, common sense says Djokovic should be one of those “exceptions.”
Djokovic already had the virus last winter. He may be one of the fittest people on the planet. Djokovic has the wherewithal to afford extra precautions and to travel privately and find secure accommodations that limit his opportunity to infect others, even if he is a potentially transmissive carrier of the disease.
Meanwhile, Biden is a president who asserts all sorts of executive authority in all kinds of ways that are either dubious at best or flat-out unconstitutional. If he can grant blanket amnesty to a flood of illegal immigrants, surely he can unilaterally waive, not for hundreds of thousands of people, but for just one, a travel prohibition that, in this traveler’s case, is senseless.
Granted, sports aren’t as important as we sports fans like to pretend they are. Still, the U.S. Open is not just a national championship but an internationally revered event. Djokovic is not just one of the two best tennis players in the world but almost inarguably one of the two greatest in history — and he’s challenging to tie the other one, Rafael Nadal, for most individual major titles since the game began.
For what it’s worth, Djokovic also is a noted philanthropist and a man of conviction and integrity. It will be a stain on the U.S. Open and the U.S. government if he is not allowed to play in the tournament that begins next week.
Message to Biden: Free the Djoker! The alternative is to make our laws a joke.
