President Joe Biden will lift travel restrictions on eight Southern African countries on Dec. 31, the White House announced on Friday. The restrictions were put into place on Nov. 29 to contain the early stages of the omicron outbreak, but with the variant now rampant globally, the U.S. has come under fire for maintaining them. They banned most non-U.S. citizens from traveling to the U.S. if they had recently been in Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, or Zimbabwe. It is here in the USA and spreading via domestic travel,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and former COVID-19 advisor to Biden, an arguing that the travel regulations were unnecessary.