South African-born comedian Trevor Noah slammed President Joe Biden’s travel ban on South Africa and several other African countries as “total bulls**t” on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on Comedy Central on Monday evening.
Noah, who spent four years bashing President Donald Trump as a racist, is experiencing the same shock as many other South Africans upon discovering belatedly that the man they backed as his replacement has little compassion for Africans at all.
South Africans believe they are being unfairly punished for warning the world about the new Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus, which did not originate in South Africa but was first detected and sequenced by scientists there.
One South African penned an angry op-ed at Independent Online: “Let’s get it right, this is not a South African variant, scientists in South Africa discovered it.”
The travel ban could have a devastating effect on the local economy.
December and January are the summer months in the Southern Hemisphere, the high season for tourism in South Africa and the time of year when South Africans working abroad are likeliest to return home to visit friends and family for the holidays.
Though President Biden acknowledged South Africa’s contribution to global health Monday, he did not lift the ban, which has no clear expiration date. Noah vented against Biden’s new ban on his show, as quoted by Yahoo! Entertainment:
“As a South African,” Trevor Noah said, “I think this travel ban is total bulls***.”
The new variant was discovered by South African scientists, but is not isolated to just that region. In fact, Noah spoke with Dr. Peter Hotez, who is co-director of the center for vaccine development at Texas Children’s Hospital, and he is opposed to travel bans of any sort.
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Noah also warned that issuing travel restrictions towards countries that report new variances could have negative repercussions. He said, “You do realize that other countries are paying attention and they realize if they are going to get punished for telling the world about new variants, they’re going to stop telling the world whenever their scientists discover new variants.”
Early in the Biden presidency, Noah expressed relief that he would not have to talk about the new president. “Biden delivered on one thing that he promised on, and that was he’s going to be the president that nobody wants to talk about,” Noah said.
On Monday, Biden’s key coronavirus policymaker, Dr. Anthony Fauci, stood squarely behind the new African travel ban, despite opposing President Trump’s travel ban on China in January 2020, when the pandemic was still a new phenomenon.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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