A Democrat House representative is pushing for vaccine passports for domestic and international air travel. Such a policy would mean citizens would have to present a vaccine passport to get on any flight within the United States.
Related: How vaccine passports are crushing freedom, privacy, and civil liberties
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) is behind the proposals. He wrote a letter to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) asking for the introduction of such a policy and also introduced a bill that would make his proposed vaccine mandates law.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
“To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that any individual traveling on a flight that departs from or arrives to an airport inside the United States or a territory of the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID–19, and for other purposes,” the bill states.
“The TSA never allows people to enter planes or airports with a weapon, and the delta variant is a weapon,” Torres told the Daily News. “It is a threat to everyone in an airport and everyone on a plane.”
Such a policy is a “commonsense step,” the congressman, who represents a congressional district in the Bronx, wrote in the letter addressed to both the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA.
Torres’ proposals could leave those hesitant about the vaccines with no choice, seeing as air travel is important to most people.
So far, the Biden administration has shied away from imposing a federal vaccine mandate of any form. The strictest policy the administration has implemented is subjecting federal workers to regular testing and a few other restrictions.
Torres feels the White House should implement vaccine mandates.
“We’ve seen the limitations of purely voluntary vaccinations,” he said. “It will only take us so far.”
