COVID-19 vaccine passports are on the march. Before long, if not already, you might need one to return to work, travel, visit your parents, attend a sports game or even a friend’s wedding. We’re well on our way already and Democrats — once the doubters of databases, IDs, and corporations — are all-in. With Republicans in Washington nearly two years from regaining any power, the battle, then, comes down to the states.
But will Republicans governors have the courage to break with the political, corporate, and global elites? Will they have the will to tell government agencies and private businesses they have no right to demand the citizens of their states subject themselves to an experimental vaccine?
Also, why should they block citizens from choosing to hand over their private data to a corporate database in exchange for trade and travel? Do the citizens of states like South Dakota, Texas, and Tennessee even have to worry about this new regime being forced on them at all?
First, there is reason to be worried no matter where you live, because this regime is coming for us. The most powerful elites in the world are enthusiastically in favor of it, and for the past year they’ve gotten their way on pretty much every single thing they’ve demanded by attaching “COVID-19” to it. Teachers unions, election integrity, and even religious liberty have all been manipulated under this guise, no matter how little they have to do with the actual disease. So how are these forces progressing on this initiative?
IBM first launched a COVID passport on Oct. 12, just weeks after the National Institute of Health awarded them a contract to develop “an integrated solution that supports sophisticated contact tracing and verifiable health status reporting.” IBM’s tech-chic website tells visitors their product is “Designed to provide organizations with a smart way to bring people back to a physical location during COVID-19.”
In a video guide just below, a soothing female voice explains the situation corporations find themselves in, and how IBM can help:
Airlines, cruise lines, railways and hotels all feel pressure to meet ever-changing health regulations and rebuild travelers’ trust. Now, COVID-19 taskforces globally are asking, ‘What can we do to return to pre-pandemic capacity? How can we verify a traveler’s health status before they [sic] visit?’ … Introducing IBM Digital Health Pass.
By March 10, Germany had signed with the company to bring its passports to Deutschland. On March 26, New York, working with IBM, became the first to launch a state vaccine passport. “Excelsior Pass,” the press release reads, “can be used by participating New Yorkers at theaters, major stadiums and arenas, weddings receptions, catered events and other events in accordance with New York State guidelines.” A week later, South Korea partnered with a Korean company to do the same.
Airlines, which for months have promised they’re about the safest place on Earth, beat them all to it. Emirates, the state airline of the United Arab Emirates, partnered with the United States’ GE to develop an immunity passport, while the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) is working with Air France, Italy’s Alitalia, the UAE’s Etihad Airways, and others to implement a passport built by a start-up called Perlin.
Meanwhile, Mastercard and the ICC are partnering to see if they can make their passports work together, while Salesforce, Walmart, Cerner, Oracle, Microsoft, Epic Systems, Mayo Clinic, and the Mitre Corporation are working on a global ID of their own.
Israel has a passport already, and the European Union is just two months away from its own. But back in the United States, while governors in Iowa, Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee, Nebraska, Mississippi, Missouri, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and South Dakota have said they would not issue or require vaccine passports, they’ve stopped short of protecting citizens from being coerced by private businesses that refuse to deal with them unless they furnish proof of vaccination.
Texas went a step further, banning private businesses that accept government money from requiring passports, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte are the only two in the country to prohibit businesses from requiring customers to provide proof of vaccination in order to conduct business.
Meanwhile, the number of private companies demanding the procedure has proliferated. In states far from New York, employees are being told they must present proof of vaccination to return to the office or travel for their companies. Far from hypothetical, as many left-wing newspapers and outlets are suggesting, the problem is present among us. The battle is now.
But is that the right battle for conservatives to join? Sure, typical Republicans are fine not using government power against private companies, as most of the above Republicans have promised, but DeSantis and Gianforte went a step further, using government power to prohibit businesses from abusing their power over private citizens. So where is the line?
The line our society must draw is at protecting citizens from medical coercion in order to conduct business. Some might worry this would constitute a mandate on businesses, but it isn’t. Mandates compel action.
States and private firms that demand vaccination are the ones leveling mandates: businesses like a lobbying firm in DC that has informed a mother who intends to have more children soon that she must get a new, emergency vaccine with unknown affects on fertility and pregnancy if she would like to travel — and thereby succeed — at the company.
Mandates aren’t always wrong. Our society has mandated that citizens reach a certain age before they are eligible to drive, to marry, to vote or run for office. We made these decisions together. Our legislators passed them.
Some private firms have their own mandates and we are happy they do, such as requiring proper attire to enter. Many of us believe airlines could use some stricter mandates on attire. What we don’t have, and what we haven’t agreed to, is mandating that mothers submit to novel and deeply invasive injections in order to do business or maintain successful employment. The case for why it is possibly “conservative” to permit any firms to force such a procedure should rest on those who believe it somehow is, not on those opposed to it.
On the other hand, denying activity that strips choice and dehumanizes citizens and families fits neatly into traditional conservative governance. “You may not compel abortion,” “you may not marry a child,” “you may not have multiple spouses” — these are bans based on traditional values we can confidently defend. “You may not mandate a novel injection for customers to engage in commerce” fits cleanly into this tradition.
Some might make the case that this denies ma and pa small businesses the right to protect themselves, but having already decided government will not maintain these databases means that decision is already outside small businesses’ abilities. Why? Ma and pa businesses don’t remotely have the resources to maintain these sorts of vaccination databases if a number of state governments won’t, so the fight exists far above them with companies that do have the resources: companies like IBM, Mastercard, and Oracle. Are we comfortable with those companies maintaining these types of databases?
Further, many of the types of companies that have already signed onto this include major corporations such as airlines. These are the firms that will demand Americans submit their bodies to the vaccine and their information to the corporate databases, and that is the plain on which the battle will be fought.
Corporate and corporate-government databases are a nightmare idea. In some states, they’re already here, and in others, including ones so far saying they won’t, powerful legislators insist they must. Powerful business interests agree.
Government-corporate databases are both a dream for hackers and a quick path to a social credit system, and the only way to retard that kind of power is to make medical mandates a terrible burden to the states and businesses that demand them. The way to do this is a patchwork of states that resist by banning them. Do corporations want to do business in states like Texas, Florida, and Montana? Do airlines want to maintain hubs in states that say no? Are companies willing to write off that much market share?
This patchwork of resistance will also bring on reluctant allies who otherwise would happily join the new regime. “If our members want to do business in Florida, or even with its people,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce might reason, “we need to lobby against this.” It’s high time that organizations like the Chamber feel compelled to work for the little guy for a change.
“I don’t care if Google is a private company because it has too much power,” J.D. Vance, bestselling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a possible 2022 Ohio candidate for senator, told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on his podcast. “And if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely you have to be concerned about power, whether it’s concentrated in the government or concentrated in big corporations.”
Vance is right. While the past year has revealed that a depressing number of Americans will yield to arbitrary power wielded in the name of COVID-19, and will surely submit to both novel medical procedures and invasive private databases just for a chance to return to normalcy, moral governance ought to protect them from being coerced into that choice at all — and should protect those who still refuse from being treated as second-class citizens.
So what can politicians do to protect their citizens from being coerced into medical procedures and databases they aren’t comfortable with?
To stop COVID vaccine passports, legislators concerned must target the databases. The databases are going to have to be digital to make sense, for speed, for efficiency, and because people will otherwise forge paperwork. The only effective way to go after them will be to prohibit any sort of digital database that collects or distributes personal medical data, and to make it a crime for organizations not covered by HIPAA to make services conditional on a customer granting access to medical data.
Organizations that are covered by HIPAA include doctors, clinics, pharmacies, nursing homes, and health-care plans, among others. If a business is not among those then it is not allowed to ask for access to your medical records. This will both protect privacy and prevent medical coercion, and when added to executive orders like those in Florida and Texas, will deal a death blow to the plan to force the COVID regime of the past year onto American citizens for years and decades to come.
We know it won’t stop with just one little ask; just a little pinprick to keep you going through the show. These things never do, and once instituted widely enough, programs like these don’t die. They simply add more and more mandated procedures as each new “public health emergency” is declared.
Will Republicans have the will to tell both government agencies and private businesses that they have no right to demand citizens subject themselves to a medical procedure or hand over sensitive and personal medical information? Will they have the courage to break with the political, corporate, and global ruling class?
Demand that they do, and do now, because we cannot afford to fight a reactionary rearguard battle — as is our habit — on this. Ask your governor and your legislators to be proactive in defense of your freedoms.
Databases aren’t theoretical, they are here, and they are spreading among us. The time to snuff this emerging corporate-government tyranny is now — or never.
