Biden's trucking priority: COVID vaccinations

The Biden administration announced today that all “essential, nonresident travelers crossing U.S land borders, such as truck drivers, government and emergency response officials” are required to be fully vaccinated by January 22, according to the Associated Press.

That includes, most notably, the longest land border between any two countries on the planet: the U.S.-Canada border. Headline from the Toronto Star: “A trucking nightmare: Supply chain horrors feared as thousands of unvaccinated drivers won’t be allowed to cross U.S.-Canada border.”…

We need every driver we can get right now, and then some. In 2020, $309 billion of freight traveled by truck between the U.S. and Canada, which was 58.8 percent of all northern-border freight, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That was 9.9 percent less than 2019. Between the pandemic recovery and the surge in spending on goods, we can expect much more than $309 billion of truck freight for 2021. Steve Bamford of the Toronto Wholesale Produce Association is quoted by the Star: “The supply chain is already broken. You can’t take 20 per cent of the workforce out of the mix and expect it not to have a major impact.”