MIAMI, FL – Congressman Carlos A. Gimenez sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urging the agency to reconsider the Conditional Sailing Order (CSO) currently preventing cruise lines from sailing. Currently, the CSO fails to consider vaccinations, it only has guidelines for testing. Today, multiple agencies are reviewing CDC guidelines that have no basis in science or reality. We need a more active response.

Gimenez, who has been on the forefront of taking on the CDC’s ban on cruise lines from sailing, blasts the CDC’s unwillingness to update the “obsolete” CSO, saying their decision hurts the local South Florida economy.

“The CDC’s intentional aversion to adapting its guidelines to the ever-changing nature of the country’s pandemic response unrelentingly destroys an industry that generates hundreds of thousands of jobs and several billions of dollars to our economy,” Gimenez wrote.

In the letter, Gimenez also points to the success foreign cruise lines have had in recent months while implementing COVID-19 mitigation protocols.

“We have already seen several foreign cruise lines have been able to resume operations with mitigation protocols. Nearly 400,000 passengers have sailed from Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific, with fewer than 50 publicly reported cases of COVD-19. These statistics underscore how we can get the American industry back up and running if federal government bureaucrats show some impetus to update these guidelines to reflect the vaccination reality,” Gimenez wrote.

For the full text of the letter, please click here.

\r\n