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Ports around the U.S. are rolling out vaccines for seafarers, extending a lifeline to thousands of mostly foreign workers who ve spent the pandemic isolated aboard ships ensuring goods kept trading across a battered global economy.
From Boston to Houston and Los Angeles, and even in smaller trade gateways like Gulfport, Miss., local health officials and nonprofits are boarding container ships, tankers and other cargo carriers to administer COVID-19 shots or, when possible, shuttling crews to nearby pharmacies and clinics.
The preferred vaccine for maritime workers: the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, because they re often docked for just a day or two.
And many of those men and women shouldn t have to be on those vessels.
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Fuelled by the Covid-19 pandemic, the crew change crisis has dragged on for months. The International Chamber of Shipping and International Transport Workers Federation has said that some 400,000 seafarers are now forced to work beyond their contract.
This is a humanitarian crisis, as the International Labour Organization described the situation in a recent statement.
Expressing deep concern for the situation, an ILO committee said inaction by its member states on the crew change could amount to forced labour .
By Holly Pate
In the tiny Pacific island nation of Fiji, nearly a thousand men, mostly from Tonga, have been stranded for months, with no way to get home. In Kiribati, a hundred men are in the same bind. Similar situations are occurring in Egypt and Canada.
Tens of thousands of seafarers are entering the holiday season away from their families, having been desperately abandoned in countries scattered around the globe as COVID-19 has closed airports in their native countries, which tend to be smaller and lacking in the capacity to handle the logistics or health care personnel to handle mass repatriations of these crews.