Just a conspiracy theory
Throughout 2020 and even much of 2021, any notion of so-called immunity passports was widely derided as being a conspiracy theory, with many posts discussing them being censored by social media platforms for suggesting they might later be used to coerce populations into vaccination.
The phenomenon of dismissing things as conspiracy theories is nothing new, but what has been especially disturbing is the outright denial of plans to implement immunity passports of any sort - even as prominent philanthropists openly discussed them on mainstream media since at least April 2020:
“eventually what we'll have to have is certificates of who's a recovered person, who's a vaccinated person, because you don't want people moving around the world, so eventually there will be sort of this digital immunity proof
What’s particularly interesting to note about this statement is that he specifically mentions proving who’s a vaccinated person, at a time when it was generally unknown whether a vaccine would actually become available.
Just a response to covid
Setting the stage, Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau told Canadians of their “new normal until a vaccine”. Anyone not paying close attention assumed they would take a vaccine, then go back to normal.
Articles began appearing a month later in mainstream media outlets like The Associated Press about “health passports”, indicating that contracts with several countries had been signed:
CPE is to start shipping orders from next week for the first phased release of 50M COVI-PASS™ Digital Health Passports to both the private sector and Governments in over 15 countries, including Italy, Portugal, France, Panama, India, the US, Canada, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, United Arab Emirates and The Netherlands
There were still no vaccines at the time, so these dealt with showing immunity status based on test results.
The World Economic Forum was also publishing videos (backup) about an implementation of health passports called CommonPass as of August 2020. By this time, the idea of widespread testing and needing to prove your status had been normalized.
Several months later, Trudeau claimed there was ‘no plan’ for vaccine passports, saying they’d be “divisive”.
And yet, he soon began changing his tune, admitting there will be vaccine passports after all, but they would be left up to the provinces. Then, he offers to pay for them. And finally, he announces the federal vaccine passport system.
Trudeau is a Global Citizen, and member of WEF - who influences more than half his cabinet and works very closely with the WHO and BMGF. It seems very unlikely he was unaware that “eventually there will be sort of this digital immunity proof”.
Just a longstanding agenda
As it turns out, vaccine passports were already in the works, even before covid. The European Commission, also recognized by the WEF, published a report, Roadmap on Vaccination, a 2018-2022 roadmap which sought to propose vaccine passports for the EU by 2022.
Whether vaccine passports tie into the broader digital & biometric ID platforms may be a matter of debate. Given what we’ve already seen, the potential for vaccination status to be integrated into such systems is certainly very real.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is a founding partner of one such digital ID initiative formed in 2016, known as ID2020. A main goal of ID2020 is to be a digital health ID that improves vaccine coverage. While this initiative isn’t directly referenced by current implementations of vaccine passports, it is something to keep in mind as things continue in this direction.
In June 2019, Forbes published an article about another digital ID platform, one specifically tailored to international travel, Paradigm Shift: Biometrics And The Blockchain Will Replace Paper Passports Sooner Than You Think:
Crossing international borders without a physical passport may become a reality for some travelers in less than a year. On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum and the governments of Canada and the Netherlands launched a pilot program for paperless travel between the two countries at Montreal's largest airport.
This is not just a theoretical concept. Along with the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, partners — including Air Canada, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, Toronto Pearson International Airport and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol — will be testing the KTDI initiative throughout 2019, with the first end-to-end paperless journey expected to take place in early 2020.
There undeniably is a trend towards to more unified digital ID platforms. While promises are made about putting more control of data into the hands of individuals, these platforms pave the way to a society where virtually every aspect of life is regulated and micro-managed. Christina Lin writes in The Times of Israel:
On March 8, China launched its domestic vaccine passport, which shows a Chinese citizen’s vaccination status and virus test results via a program on Chinese social media platform WeChat.
The following day on March 9, China urged the World Health Organization (WHO) to allow Beijing to build and run a global database for “vaccine passports”, prompting fears over privacy and expansion of government surveillance.
The apps track a user’s location and produces a color code of green, yellow or red to indicate the likelihood of their having the virus, and whether or not the person can walk around freely.
In the China standards 2035 report, Chinese authorities expressed goals to “seize the opportunity” that Covid-19 created by proliferating China’s authoritarian information system. It aims to co-opt the global industry by capturing the industrial Internet of Things, define the next generation of information technology and biotechnology infrastructure, and export China’s social credit system.
One has to question, not only whether it makes any sense for the entire world to adopt China’s model, but also whether the surface-level selling points of these digital ID platforms even hold up in the face of the previously unthinkable socio-economic disparity already wraught by these early implementations that are being feverishly foist upon us in the name of “fighting covid”.
When covid is long forgotten, the control systems now being instituted will remain. We need to think long and hard about this, and insist upon honest and open public discourse, rather than allow a tiny number of completely unaccountable individuals to decide our future.