Foreign Citizens Seek US-Approved Vaccines As Travel Resumes

Above, Asia Lipovetckaia and Armand at the 2016 portrait unveiling party at the Odyssey Restaurant. Photo by Lori Thornhill.

As the U.S. is opening up to foreign travelers, many of them are in a quandary. The vaccine they received, such as Sputnik V, is not recognized by the Food and Drug Administration. In order to be allowed in, they must be vaccinated with FDA-approved vaccines.

KRQE reported:

Starting Monday, the United States plans to reopen to foreign travelers who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. But there’s a catch: non-immigrant adults need to have received vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration or which received an emergency use listing from the World Health Organization.

That leaves many hopeful travelers across the globe who taken full courses of vaccines widely used in other parts of the world — Sputnik V and the China-produced CanSino jab, in particular — scrambling to get reinoculated with shots approved by U.S. authorities.

Two other Chinese vaccines, Sinopharm and Sinovac, have been approved by the WHO and will thus be accepted for travel into the U.S.

While Sputnik V is used in around 70 countries worldwide, it has still not been approved by either the FDA or the U.N. health agency. Nearly 1 million people have received the vaccine in Hungary, a Central European country of around 10 million.

Hungary was one of only two countries in the 27-member European Union to roll out the Russian vaccine. Fewer than 20,000 people received it in Slovakia.

Citizens of Russia, where use of Sputnik V is most widespread, also are seeking Western-approved shots so they can travel abroad. Faced with the prospect of being turned away from flights, Russians have booked tours to Serbia, which has authorized use of the Pfizer-BioNTech, China’s Sinopharm and the AstraZeneca vaccines in addition to Sputnik V.

Russia, which unveiled Sputnik V with much fanfare as the world’s first registered vaccine in August 2020, criticized U.S. plans to leave the vaccine off its list of approved shots.

Artist Asia Lipovetckaia of St. Petersburg, Russia was planning to come to New Mexico for a 2-3 week visit, but the pandemic hit and those plans had to be scrubbed. She can come to the U.S. if she gets vaccinated by a FDA or WHO-approved vaccine. She could go to Serbia to get it as the above article stated. To date, she has not been vaccinated.

To read the full article, go here.