The COVID passport idea is nuts. Sorry, we don’t need a passport to do simple things like going to a baseball game or the grocery store. The Biden White House endorses this idea. They’re letting Big Tech draft up the blueprints. You know this is going to be a nightmare. It’s a Soviet-style internal passport system that will probably never pass constitutional muster, but that doesn’t mean Democrats won’t try and take this for a ride. Look at what they’ve done with the COVID lockdowns. Hell, there’s even another layer to this rush to mass track the movement of ordinary Americans.
NEW - Biden admin is set to launch a #COVID19 passport that Americans must have to engage in commerce and would track Americans that took the vaccine (WaPo)
— Disclose.tv ?? (@disclosetv) March 28, 2021
The University of Illinois has developed a program that businesses can use to accept or deny potential customers based on their health data. The Washington Free Beacon wrote about this, with the added bonus that this is exactly what the Chinese do with their citizens.
Vice News, which I actually like to read every now and then, wrote about the passports and how we’re all overreacting because they don’t exist.
“The GOP Wants to Save You From ‘Vaccine Passports’ That Mostly Don’t Exist,” reads the headline, but the article negates itself mid-way through the piece: [emphasis mine]
Conservatives have opened up the latest front in the culture war, and it’s “vaccine passports.”
On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order banning the state and local governments, as well as organizations receiving state funding, from requiring documentation of inoculation.
"Government should not require any Texan to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives,” Abbott said in a statement announcing the move. “We will continue to vaccinate more Texans and protect public health—and we will do so without treading on Texans' personal freedoms."
Last month, New York became the first state to roll out such a voluntary program, using an app created by IBM called Excelsior Pass, and it’s been used at NBA and NHL games in New York. Also last month, Walmart announced a plan to make the vaccine records of people inoculated at their stores available digitally.
But so far, the backlash has outpaced the project itself.
Texas is one of four states whose governors have either signed laws or announced executive orders barring these so-called “passports,” along with Florida, Idaho, and Utah. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the first governor to weigh in, signed an executive order last week that not only bars state agencies from issuing such documents but also bans businesses from requiring customers to be vaccinated as well.
"It's completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society," DeSantis said at a press conference last week.
New @washingtonpost:
— Geoffrey A. Fowler (@geoffreyfowler) April 8, 2021
We tested America’s first state vaccine passport — New York’s Excelsior Pass — at a Yankees game.
It didn’t work.
Just wait until you hear about how easy these passes were to fake, too.
My review: https://t.co/nWLRVeTSNd pic.twitter.com/MIiXuid9iB
So, they do exist. It’s just not mandatory yet. Also, when should the backlash happen? When this mass surveillance project is primed and ready to go? We’re trusting the government to keep safe highly sensitive information about its citizens. Are we all on crack like Hunter Biden? This whole project is a prime target for hacking and forgeries. It’s a civil liberties nightmare. It’s also being quarterbacked by an industry that has a long history of censoring or outright banning conservatives and conservative media outlets that could disrupt Democratic narratives. Waving ‘hello’ to Hunter Biden again, whose laptop was the 2020 October surprise story that was snuffed out by Big Tech and the liberal media. There should be outrage over this ten-fold.
When has the government ever backed away from any initiative that increases its power? It’s their drug. And in the absence of law regulating such technology, they will try and make a rush for the goal line the same way they did when they illegally recorded conversations of people during Prohibition.
The COVID passport initiative is a constitutionally ruinous idea. It may die in the legal system. It may die in the technical phases of development. I’m not leaving that to the courts or engineering failures, however. We’re the guinea pigs here—and we should all be yelling one word “NO” regarding this proposal.
Last Note: With that Washington Post piece on their pass, they did note the privacy security was pretty good, but they're very easy to fake. So, we're really back to square one and the evolution process to this initiative is just grounded in every dystopian piece of literature out there. Philip K. Dick would probably find all of this rather amusing.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member