How did Germany manage to exist for more than 70 years without a queer commissioner? Many may be forgiven for not having pondered this question, especially during a pandemic which has decimated the civil rights of a third of the population.

Sven Lehmann, Member of the Green Party, has announced that he wants to make Germany a pioneer in the fight against discrimination against transgender, homosexual and other sexual minorities. “Everyone should be able to live freely, safely and with equal rights,” he declared on Wednesday. Except of course the unvaccinated.

The federal government appointed the Green politician as the first commissioner for the acceptance of sexual and gender diversity. The new government will in future “pursue a progressive queer policy and also align family policy with the social reality of different types of families,” Lehmann announced. The SPD, Greens and FDP had already announced this plan in the coalition agreement.

The fact that nothing like this has ever existed, apparently weighed heavily on some.

“The protection of people on the basis of their sexual and gender identity must be ensured in the Basic Law and the fundamental rights of trans, inter and non-binary people must finally be fully enforced.” That is why Lehmann is planning a national action plan to protect “queer” people together with the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs.

In addition to their diets, federal government officials receive an allowance of around 43 000 euros per year. Lehmann sits in the German Bundestag for the Cologne constituency.

Female crash test dummies or just female dummies?

Germany has been busy cancelling itself proactively: In October last year, Hamburg’s deputy mayor called for “gender-neutral mobility”. The Green politician wanted crash tests in the auto industry to be carried out with female dummies in the future. This already raised the question: When will dummies for transgender people, non-binary people and people defining themselves as queer follow?

Deputy mayor Fegebank demanded that “female” dummies be used. Because although women drive almost only half of the average kilometres covered by men, about half of all road accident victims are female, as the Merkur reported.

The reason for this is not bad female drivers but that new cars are tested with “male” crash test dummies that have a standardised height of 1,75 metres and a weight of 78 kilograms.

Cars are less safe for mostly small and less heavy women, who have to push the seat forward to reach the clutch or the brake, for example, than for the “average man”, who is considered the template for the dummy, according to Fegebank, and female crash test dummies are to be introduced in the Hanseatic city to ensure “gender-neutral mobility”.

According to the Green politician, car manufacturing and accident research should address the differentiated requirements of women, men, old and young people as well as people with disabilities. She said dummies that are equal to the “prototype man” should be crashed as soon as possible.

These “protective” measures from a leftwing coalition in power are deemed necessary in a country which experiences more political violence categorized as “left” than comparable acts from the right spectrum. This has emerged from a response by the federal government to a small question from the AfD parliamentary group, which asked about politically motivated acts of violence.

According to the information, from January to September 2021 there were exactly 836 left-wing politically motivated violent crimes, the majority of which were physical, and 715 right-wing political violent crimes.

Some 94 violent crimes are to be assigned to the phenomenon of “foreign ideology” and 40 to the area of ​​”religious ideology”, a further 786 are not to be assigned at all.

A total of 2471 politically motivated acts of violence were counted from January to September. Leftwing violence is clearly on the rise: According to the government, 3 365 acts in this crime area were recorded in 2020 as a whole, while in 2019 there were 2 832 cases registered.

Conspiracy theories?

Unwanted political, historical, philosophical and scientific interpretations are dismissed by German politicians and the mass media fully in the grip of mass formation psychosis as “conspiracy theories”. They seem to come from the “edge of society”, where, according to the semi-official version, all sorts of dubious thoughts are exchanged.

In truth, it’s the other way around: the most powerful conspiracy theories come from above. Hollywood promotes them, the BBC and CNN, and German politicians and media are trotting out the same fantasies as their Anglo-Saxon “diversity” role models.

The fact that Corona will mutate and thus become less dangerous and that the pandemic will end as soon as a less dangerous variant prevails and infects the population, is currently considered a dangerous “conspiracy theory” repeated by incorrigible opponents of vaccination. They are blocked on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

But this is exactly what Isabella Eckerle, the head of the Center for Viral Diseases at Geneva University Hospital – an eminent virologist – said in the first half of December 2021.

According to German Health Minister, a 2G-Plus rule must apply to access to cafes and restaurants. “Gastronomy is a problem area. You often sit for hours without a mask,” said Lauterbach told RTL on Thursday evening. Many people infected each other with the Omicron virus in these establishments, he said.

Omicron is believed to be even less deadly than flu. But according to Lauterbach, “this assessment is a misconception”. He could not resist the temptation to spread more panic adding that “of the unvaccinated, many will die“.

Lauterbach is the most popular politician in Germany. Surveyed by the opinion research institute infratest dimap for ARD, 66 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the fear monger, ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (60 percent).

It is worth remembering that Germany has already required medical grade masks and N95’s with extremely high compliance, and nevertheless suffered significantly more deaths than Sweden for all of 2021.

As The Experts move the goalposts to surgical or N95 masks, it’s worth remembering that Germany has already required medical grade masks and N95’s with extremely high compliance, and reported significantly more deaths than Sweden for all of 2021

They are literally always wrong pic.twitter.com/3jc2nlFOZX

— IM (@ianmSC) January 5, 2022

freewestmedia.com

Amid studies showing a link between some vaccines and heart problems, professional athletes appear to be collapsing on the field of dreams like never before. Are these incidences normal occurrences, coincidences or symptomatic of mandatory vaccine programs?

As more countries make vaccinations mandatory requirements for participating in many aspects of life, including that of sporting events, stadiums around the world have become something of testing grounds for determining the efficacy of the rollout. Thus far the results do not look particularly promising.

Last month, the world of female rugby was rocked by the news that Scottish sensation Siobhan Cattigan, 26, died suddenly “in non-suspicious circumstances,” as the Daily Mail reported. Yet anytime a young person – not least of all a healthy star athlete – dies unexpectedly there is some inherent element of ‘suspicion’ involved. Perhaps not in the criminal sense, but certainly from a medical point of view.

Moreover, had Cattigan’s premature death, the cause of which has not been disclosed, been an isolated event then it could be chalked up as something of a tragic ‘fluke.’ It appears, however, that Cattigan’s sudden death was not an isolated event, but rather part of a disturbing trend in the world of sports.

Scottish Rugby is deeply saddened to hear of the tragic passing of Scotland international and @StirlingCounty player Siobhan Cattigan.

https://t.co/txAVOHsqMs pic.twitter.com/l13wtlOYl4

— Scottish Rugby (@Scotlandteam) November 30, 2021

Last month, three professional athletes were stricken by health emergencies in the same week. Football player for Wigan Athletic, Charlie Wyke, 28, suffered cardiac arrest during scrimmage and was taken to hospital where he was reported in stable condition. Wyke credited emergency CPR performed by manager Leam Richardson with helping to save his life.

Days later, John Fleck, 30, a player with Sheffield United, was carried off the field on a stretcher during a Championship game against Reading. The Daily Mail, citing an anonymous source, reported rather defensively that “John Fleck’s issue was not vaccination related.” The list doesn’t end there.

In late October, Barcelona player Sergio Aguero, 33, considered one of the best strikers today, had his dazzling career cut short after being diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia following a match; on November 1st, Icelandic midfielder Emil Palsson, 28, required resuscitation after a cardiac arrest 12 minutes into play; on June 12, Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen, 29, named Danish Football Player of the Year a record five times, suffered a heart attack at Euro 2020 and given cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He announced his retirement from the sport after being fitted with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator to regulate his heartbeat.

Footballers suddenly collapsing on the field used to be a mercifully rare experience.

It’s now almost a daily one.

Are any mainstream media journalists investigating the sudden rise in these events? https://t.co/RK6xj7YaGd

— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) November 25, 2021

Do any of these health emergencies prove that the mandated Covid vaccines were to blame? Absolutely not. In fact, many medical professionals who have been quoted in the media on these incidences are inclined to blame “coincidence.” The Daily Mail went so far as to say that many scientists have rejected the suggestion that vaccines were suspect “especially as the country braces itself for a possible wave of more cases and deaths from Covid after the discovery of the Omicron variant.”

The conclusion by Reuters, after consulting with a number of medical experts, was nearly identical: “No evidence COVID-19 vaccines are linked to athletes collapsing or dying from myocarditis.”

Nevertheless, the sudden spate of on-field emergencies has raised questions among several seasoned veterans of the game.

“In my 19 years as a pro footballer & and then my 20+ years watching and commenting, I’ve never seen ANY players collapse, pass out, etc either live or during any of the thousands of training sessions and matches I’ve taken part in,” remarked ex pro-footballer Kevin Gage over Twitter.

Former England star Trevor Sinclair speaking about the incident involving Fleck on radio station TalkSport, commented: “I think everyone wants to know if he (Fleck) has had the Covid vaccine.”

Everyone I speak to about these heart problems suffered by footballers (which worryingly seem to be happening more regularly) are they linked to covid vaccines or not??

— Trevor Sinclair (@trevor8sinclair) November 24, 2021

Anecdotal evidence aside, is there anything in the medical literature to suggest a cause and effect may be in play? The answer points to the affirmative, with various studies indicating possible health issues associated with the vaccines, yet these risks, albeit rare, are being downplayed by social and mainstream media.

In early November, the American Heart Association, not your average right-wing group of conspiracy theorists, released a report with the lengthy title: ‘Abstract 10712: Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning.’

The conclusion from the AHA seems worthy of some attention: “We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”

Despite the long-standing reputation of the AHA, Twitter actually fixed a warning stamp on the link to the study, claiming it may be “unsafe.”

What the hell is going on? pic.twitter.com/WlpUKP8QFU

— Heidegger (@Kukicat7) November 8, 2021

Meanwhile, the first glimpse of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial data – which is being released at the excruciatingly slow rate of 500 pages per month, meaning that full disclosure will not occur until the year 2076 – does little to instill confidence.

Zerohedge, quoting journalist Kyle Becker, reported “there were a total of 42,086 case reports for adverse reactions (25,379 medically confirmed, 16,707 non-medically confirmed), spanning 158,893 total events.

More than 25,000 of the events were classified as “nervous system disorders.”

Again, none of this proves that the vaccines are to blame for the apparent rise in collapses now happening in various sporting events. Indeed, it has been suggested that Covid-19 itself may be to blame for increasing the frequency of cardiac arrest through “some inflammatory response,” Dr. Satjit Bhusri, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told WebMD.

The point is we just don’t know. As the world navigates its way painstakingly through this period of impenetrable darkness, along a coastline riddled with dangerous rock formations, it would seem wise not to discount any possibilities, no matter how unsettling. That is the only way of allowing the science to indiscriminately determine the facts. Ignoring the other side of the debate as ‘conspiracy theorists,’ however, will prevent the necessary discussion from happening in the first place, which may very well be the goal behind such a risky game.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

By Jake JOHNSON

Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech — the makers of the two most successful coronavirus vaccines — are raking in a combined $65,000 in profits every minute as they refuse to share their manufacturing recipes with developing countries, where billions of people still lack access to lifesaving shots.

According to a new People’s Vaccine Alliance analysis of recent earnings reports, People’s Vaccine Alliance,  “It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour while just two percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus,” said Maaza Seyoum of the People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa.

“Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritize the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold.”

Moderna — a Massachusetts-based company that developed its vaccine with the help of government research and around $10 billion in taxpayer funding — has delivered just 0.2 percent of its total vaccine supply to low-income countries, the People’s Vaccine Alliance estimates. The coronavirus vaccine is Moderna’s only product on the market.

Pfizer and its Germany-based partner BioNTech — whose vaccine was also helped along by taxpayer money — haven’t done much better than their competitor, sending less than 1 percent of their supply to poor nations while profiting hugely from sales to rich countries.

“Predominantly, right now, we have already signed orders, and those are with high-income countries,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla recently said of coronavirus vaccine sales for next year, blaming poor countries for not ordering shots quickly enough.

“We are negotiating right now with few middle-income countries, and with even fewer low-income countries,” Bourla said.

But public health campaigners argue that bilateral deals and vaccine donations are not sufficient to bring production and distribution into line with global needs. Instead, they say, pharmaceutical giants must relinquish their vaccine recipes and allow qualified manufacturers around the world to produce low-cost generic versions for their populations.

Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have thus far refused to do so — and lobbied aggressively against a World Trade Organization proposal to temporarily suspend vaccine patents. Bourla, for his part, has dismissed technology-transfer proposals as “dangerous nonsense.”

“Contrary to what Pfizer’s CEO says, the real nonsense is claiming the experience and expertise to develop and manufacture lifesaving medicines and vaccines does not exist in developing countries,” Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam International, said in a statement Tuesday. “This is just a false excuse that pharmaceutical companies are hiding behind to protect their astronomical profits.”

“It is also a complete failure of government to allow these companies to maintain monopoly control and artificially constrain supply in the midst of a pandemic while so many people in the world are yet to be vaccinated,” she added.

Common Dreams via consortiumnews.com

Nearly all Americans agree that the rampant spread of misinformation is a problem.

Most also think social media companies, and the people that use them, bear a good deal of blame for the situation. But few are very concerned that they themselves might be responsible, according to a new poll from The Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information. About half put a great deal of blame on the U.S. government, and about three-quarters point to social media users and tech companies. Yet only 2 in 10 Americans say they’re very concerned that they have personally spread misinformation.

More, about 6 in 10, are at least somewhat concerned that their friends or family members have been part of the problem.

For Carmen Speller, a 33-year-old graduate student in Lexington, Kentucky, the divisions are evident when she’s discussing the coronavirus pandemic with close family members. Speller trusts COVID-19 vaccines; her family does not. She believes the misinformation her family has seen on TV or read on questionable news sites has swayed them in their decision to stay unvaccinated against COVID-19.

In fact, some of her family members think she’s crazy for trusting the government for information about COVID-19.

“I do feel like they believe I’m misinformed. I’m the one that’s blindly following what the government is saying, that’s something I hear a lot,” Speller said. “It’s come to the point where it does create a lot of tension with my family and some of my friends as well.”

Speller isn’t the only one who may be having those disagreements with her family.

The survey found that 61% of Republicans say the U.S. government has a lot of responsibility for spreading misinformation, compared with just 38% of Democrats.

There’s more bipartisan agreement, however, about the role that social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, play in the spread of misinformation.

According to the poll, 79% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats said social media companies have a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for misinformation.

And that type of rare partisan agreement among Americans could spell trouble for tech giants like Facebook, the largest and most profitable of the social media platforms, which is under fire from Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike.

“The AP-NORC poll is bad news for Facebook,” said Konstantin Sonin, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago who is affiliated with the Pearson Institute. “It makes clear that assaulting Facebook is popular by a large margin — even when Congress is split 50-50, and each side has its own reasons.”

“It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said during a meeting of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Democrats and Republicans ended the hearing with acknowledgement that regulations must be introduced to change the way Facebook amplifies its content and targets users.

The poll also revealed that Americans are willing to blame just about everybody but themselves for spreading misinformation, with 53% of them saying they’re not concerned that they’ve spread misinformation.

“We see this a lot of times where people are very worried about misinformation but they think it’s something that happens to other people — other people get fooled by it, other people spread it,” said Lisa Fazio, a Vanderbilt University psychology professor who studies how false claims spread. “Most people don’t recognize their own role in it.”

Younger adults tend to be more concerned that they’ve shared falsehoods, with 25% of those ages 18 to 29 very or extremely worried that they have spread misinformation, compared to just 14% of adults ages 60 and older. Sixty-three percent of older adults are not concerned, compared with roughly half of other Americans.

Yet it’s older adults who should be more worried about spreading misinformation, given that research shows they’re more likely to share an article from a false news website, Fazio said.

Before she shares things with family or her friends on Facebook, Speller tries her best to make sure the information she’s passing on about important topics like COVID-19 has been peer-reviewed or comes from a credible medical institution. Still, Speller acknowledges there has to have been a time or two that she “liked” or hit “share” on a post that didn’t get all the facts quite right.

“I’m sure it has happened,” Speller said. “I tend to not share things on social media that I didn’t find on verified sites. I’m open to that if someone were to point out, ‘Hey this isn’t right,’ I would think, OK, let me check this.”

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,071 adults was conducted Sept. 9-13 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

apnews.com

By Jeremy LOFFREDO, Max BLUMENTHAL

The titans of global capitalism are exploiting the Covid-19 crisis to institute social credit-style digital ID systems across the West.

The death by starvation of Etwariya Devi, a 67-year-old widow from the rural Indian state of Jharkhand, might have passed without notice had it not been part of a more widespread trend.

Like 1.3 billion of her fellow Indians, Devi had been pushed to enroll in a biometric digital ID system called Aadhaar in order to access public services, including her monthly allotment of 25kg of rice. When her fingerprint failed to register with the shoddy system, Devi was denied her food ration. Throughout the course of the following three months in 2017, she was repeatedly refused food until she succumbed to hunger, alone in her home.

Premani Kumar, a 64-year-old woman also from Jharkhand, met the same demise as Devi, dying of hunger and exhaustion the same year after the Aadhaar system transferred her pension payments to another person without her permission, while cutting off her monthly food rations.

A similarly cruel fate was reserved for Santoshi Kumari, an 11-year-old girl, also from Jharkhand, who reportedly died begging for rice after her family’s ration card was canceled because it had not been linked to their Aadhaar digital ID.

These three heart-rending casualties were among a spate of deaths in rural India in 2017 which came as a direct result of the Aadhaar digital ID system.

With over one billion Indians in its database, Aadhaar is the largest biometric digital ID program ever constructed. Besides serving as a portal to government services, it tracks users’ movements between cities, their employment status, and purchasing records. It is a de facto social credit system that serves as the key entry point for accessing services in India.

Having branded Aadhaar’s creator, fellow billionaire Nandan Nilekani, as a “hero,” initiatives backed by tech oligarch Bill Gates have long sought to bring the “Aadhaar approach to other countries.” With the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, Gates and other mavens of the digital ID industry have an unprecedented opportunity to introduce their programs into the wealthy countries of the Global North.

For those yearning for an end to pandemic-related restrictions, credential programs certifying their vaccination against Covid-19 have been marketed as the key to reopening the economy and restoring their personal freedom. But the implementation of immunity passports is also accelerating the establishment of a global digital identity infrastructure.

As the military surveillance firm and NATO contractor Thales recently put it, vaccine passports “are a precursor to digital ID wallets.”

And as the CEO of iProove, a biometric ID company and Homeland Security contractor, emphasized to Forbes, “The evolution of vaccine certificates will actually drive the whole field of digital ID in the future. So, therefore, this is not just about Covid, this is about something even bigger.”

For the national security state, digital immunity passports promise unprecedented control over populations wherever such systems are implemented. Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, Canada has described the vaccine passport system already active in her province as “a new, inescapable web of surveillance with geolocation data being tracked everywhere.”

For tech oligarchs such Bill Gates and neoliberal institutions such as the World Economic Forum, digital ID and digital currency systems have already enabled the extraction of unbelievable profits in the Global South, where hundreds of millions of people remain “unbanked” and therefore outside the sphere of electronic payments systems.

Now, with grassroots protest building against an exclusionary regime of vaccine passports, the captains of global capitalism are campaigning with more urgency than ever to bring digital ID to the West.

For these elite interests, the digitization of immunity passports represent a critical tool in a long-planned economic and political transformation.

“With no Covid Pass, my wife and I are banished from society”

Across the globe, the certification of vaccination against COVID-19 is already a requirement to participate in daily life.

In Indonesia, COVID-19 vaccines are mandatory, and those who refuse may face fines or be refused access to public services. In Greece, residents must present immunity to work in or enter bars, theaters, and other indoor public spaces.

France has similarly required residents to carry a health pass for access to all restaurants, bars, trains, and any venue accommodating more than 50 people, a decision that has stoked widespread protests throughout the country. The socialist French former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has blasted the new restrictions as “absurd, unfair and authoritarian.”

Les premiers contrôles de #Police ont démarré à titre préventif à #Paris dans les cafés et restaurants où le #PassSanitaire est obligatoire dès aujourd’hui. Verbalisation de 135 euros à partir de la semaine prochaine, jusqu’à 9000 euro en cas de récidive.#Passanitaire #reuters pic.twitter.com/Vvyh75sun3

— Antony Paone (@PaoneAntony) August 9, 2021

Italy has mandated its Green Pass for all workers, threatening them with termination from jobs and suspension of pay. Italy also requires the pass to use Italian public transit. Scenes of private security over-enforcement of the Green Pass and the exclusion of Italy’s elderly from vital services have already begun to go viral on social media.

Italy’s Green Pass in action: an old woman is turned away from medical exams at a hospital because she can’t produce her mandatory “health” passport. These systems inherently discriminate against members of vulnerable groups and encourage private security overreach, as seen here. https://t.co/Y9Tr12A9jq

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 19, 2021

Restrictions for Lithuanians who are not double vaccinated or unable to demonstrate recent prior infection from Covid-19 represent some of the harshest in the world. They are banned from restaurants, all non-essential stores, shopping centers, beauty services, libraries, banks or insurance agencies, universities, inpatient medical care, and train travel.

Gluboco Lietuva, a self-described “Lithuanian father” who has refused vaccination, stated on Twitter: “With no Covid Pass, my wife and I are banished from society. We have no income. Banned from most shopping. Can barely exist.”

Life under the EU’s first strictly-enforced Covid Pass regime covering all society: Lithuania.

Without a Pass, you’re banned: shopping, work, eating out…

This is the future facing countries that impose a Covid Pass: EU, US, UK,Australia,Canada…

Is this the world you want? pic.twitter.com/xdffSPriNO

— Gluboco Lietuva (@gluboco) September 25, 2021

Four out of ten Canadian provinces currently require citizens to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 to enter indoor public venues like restaurants and theaters. All federal public servants and some other workers must be vaccinated to keep their jobs.

The government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also requires all air travelers and interprovincial train travelers to be vaccinated. Canada’s Alberta province took the measures a step further this September when it announced that those who cannot prove full COVID vaccination will no longer be allowed to socialize indoors in groups of more than 12.

In Israel, meanwhile, only those who have received three doses can work or shop indoors and go to restaurants; citizens who received two shots over six months ago are now considered unvaccinated. This rule has consolidated what even the New York Times has deemed a “two-tier system for the vaccinated and unvaccinated … raising legal, moral and ethical questions.”

In the US, President Joe Biden is “moving forward with vaccination requirements wherever [he] can.” Biden, who declared that his “patience is wearing thin” with unvaccinated Americans, recently announced new federal requirements mandating that about 80 million Americans – including all those who work at companies with more than 100 employees – must either be vaccinated or get tested for COVID-19 weekly.

Biden has also mandated that those working at facilities which receive Medicare or Medicaid must show proof of immunity to keep their jobs. According to AP, President Biden is considering proof of immunity for interstate travel, a restriction his former public health advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel, has clamored for.

In the state of Colorado, the UCHealth hospital system has announced that it will not allow organ transplants to be performed on unvaccinated patients, prompting some to travel to Texas for life-saving procedures.

New York City offers a glimpse of the program in store for the rest of the country. The city’s “Key to NYC” requirement, which went into effect September 13, requires proof of vaccination to work at or attend indoor dining, indoor fitness, and entertainment venues like museums, stadiums, arcades, and theaters.

“If you want to participate in our society fully, you’ve got to get vaccinated,” Mayor De Blasio stated. “[New York City] is a miraculous place literally full of wonders … if you’re un-vaccinated, unfortunately, you will not be able to participate.”

COVID-related mandates could be permanent

While outlets like CNN have referred to vaccine passports as a “useful, temporary measure,” it is increasingly evident that the proof of immunity restrictions imposed on Western populations may not go away any time soon.

Australia’s New South Wales Ministry of Health Dr. Kerry Chant has stated that citizens “need to get used to being vaccinated with COVID vaccines for the future… it will be a regular cycle of vaccination and revaccination.”

Albert Bourla, CEO of the Pfizer corporation that has seen its stock skyrocket during the pandemic, remarked that the “most likely scenario” is coronavirus vaccine shots mandated on an annual basis.

As a February Nature headline read, “the coronavirus is here to stay.” Or, as Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health Emergency Program, put it: it is “very, very, unlikely” that COVID-19 will ever go away.

“Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon,” said Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “It’s unrealistic.”

“This is our life from now, in waves,” Israel’s Coronavirus Czar, Salman Zarka, acknowledged.

Already, Zarka has prepared plans to mandate a fourth dose for Israelis.

COVID mandates to be digitally enforced

While a state-mandated treadmill of boosters may seem unappealing to many, if not outright hellish, for others the nightmare presents the opportunity of a lifetime. As early as May 2020, only seven weeks after the pandemic was declared, US tech billionaire Bill Gates predicted that “eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”

Now, over a year later, a growing number of local and national governments require some form of digital proof of vaccination or natural immunity against COVID-19.

Those who want to travel to Canada, for example, are required to download an app that verifies the vaccination status of incoming travelers. The government also plans to introduce a federal, Canada-wide digital vaccine passport in the coming months.

When the European Union (EU) opened up to foreign tourists this summer, it introduced a “Digital COVID Certificate” which granted entry to those vaccinated against COVID-19, those who have had a negative test, or those who recently recovered from an infection. Its proposed “Digital Green Certificate” has been branded as a means to facilitate safe free movement inside the EU during the pandemic.

The government of France is partnering with a biometric technology company called IDEMIA to “make it easier for its citizens to prove their identity and complete online transactions using a smartphone.” The new app will “enable French citizens to place their national electronic identification cards [introduced to France as a COVID-19 response in August 2021] …  on the back of their smartphones and have their identity instantly confirmed.” IDEMIA is also helping France certify travelers immunity data with their Health Travel Pass suite.

The US is still accepting paper vaccination records, and President Biden has insisted no national app is in the works. However, seven U.S. states (California, New York, Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and Hawaii) have already implemented apps certifying vaccination against COVID-19 and have various degrees of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in place.

ImmunaBand, a wearable wristband, whose company mission is “to bring the world a little closer in a time of the COVID-19 pandemic and for you to demonstrate to the world your vaccination status,” has also been approved by New York City as proof of vaccination.

“In typical American fashion, the US government is relegating the creation of digital vaccination certifications to the private sector,” stated the non-profit Data & Society.

Indeed, behind the push for digital vaccine passports is a coterie of supra-national neoliberal institutions guided by oligarchic tech industry donors.

Elite corporate interests behind digital COVID passports

Mega-corporations, international finance institutions, and billionaire-backed private foundations have played a vital role in lobbying for and implementing digital immunity passports.

The burgeoning global health passport system has been coordinated under the umbrella of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO). However, this institution is so intertwined with wealthy private interests it can hardly be characterized as a “public” health body.

As former WHO director Margaret Chan told filmmaker Lilian Franck, “only 30 percent of my budget is predictable funds. The other 70 percent, I have to take a hat and go around the world to beg for money. And when they give us the money, [it] is highly linked to their preferences, what they like.”

Chief among those private funders is the second wealthiest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which happens to be the second largest donor to the WHO.

Bill Gates with World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom

Also at the forefront of the shift to digital credentials is the World Economic Forum (WEF). “The Forum is involved in the WHO task force to reflect on those [vaccine credential requirements] standards and think about how they would be used,” reads a May WEF article.

On paper, the WEF (also known as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation) is an NGO and think tank “committed to improving the state of the world.” In reality, it is an international network of some of the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet. The Forum positions itself as the thought leader of global capitalism.

The organization is best known for its annual gathering of the global ruling class. Each year, hedge fund managers, bankers, CEOs, media representatives, and heads of state gather in Davos to “shape global, regional and industry agendas.” As Foreign Affairs put it, “the WEF has no formal authority, but it has become the major forum for elites to discuss policy ideas and priorities.”

In 2017, German economist and WEF founder Klaus Schwab introduced the concept of “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” with the title of the book he published that year. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) denotes the current “technological revolution” that is changing the way people “live, work, and relate to one another,” and with implications “unlike anything humankind has experienced,” according to Schwab.

For him, the 4IR is the “merging of the physical, digital and biological worlds.” Schwab has even said that the 4IR will inevitably veer into trans-humanism, or human genome editing.

Klaus Schwab, 2015:

‘And you see, the difference of the fourth industrial revolution is, it doesn’t change what you are doing, it changes you. If you take genetic editing just as an example, it’s you who are changed’#greatreset #thegreatreset pic.twitter.com/IWFJoqrVkG

— Ole Ó’Súilleabháin : (@OlisGud) September 6, 2021

In January 2021, several WEF partners, including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and several other “heavyweights,” announced a partnership to launch the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI) to develop digital immunization authentication tools, according to Forbes.

Aiming to institute a single “SMART Health Card” for the world, the VCI intends for its SMART Health Cards to be recognized “across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.”

In the US, some states are already deploying the SMART Health Cards developed by the VCI. These SMART Health Cards have laid the basis for a de-facto national standard for vaccine credentials.

“If enough states embrace the technology, it could become a de facto nationwide standard and relieve the Biden administration of having to lay out federal requirements for domestic purposes,” Politico noted.

SMART Health Cards have emerged as a de facto national standard for vaccine credentials. JP Pollak, co-founder of @commons_prjct predicts these credentials will be available to 100M+ Americans within a month. Via @HiawathaBray at @BostonGlobe https://t.co/wnkdv88AAE pic.twitter.com/xz5vEU03jW

— The Commons Project Foundation (@commons_prjct) August 9, 2021

The latest version of Apple’s iOS, iOS 15, even includes SMART Health Card support.

As of today, those who received a vaccine in California, Hawaii, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, or certain counties in Maryland can obtain a SMART Health Card from the state.

In most other states, a SMART Health Card is available to those who were vaccinated at one of more than 17,100 CVS, Walgreen’s, or Rite Aid pharmacy chains nationwide.

“More states, pharmacies, and health systems will begin issuing SMART Health Cards very soon,” promises the site of the Commons Project, one of the founders of the VCI initiative.

Commons Project CEO Paul Meyer happens to be a WEF “young leader.”

Commons Project CEO and World Economic Forum Young Leader Paul Meyer

In India, tech oligarchs use digital ID to force social credit on rural poor, spawning exclusion and even death

In 2015, The Gates Foundation provided seed money to a Yale School of Public Health project that would become known as Khushi Baby. Now a non-profit, Khushi Baby makes microchip-equipped necklaces for a child to wear at all times to track their vaccination status and establish continuous monitoring from their first immunizations through adulthood. The non-profit says it is now using data from over 35,000 villages in India to create algorithms that “predict health outcomes for mothers and children.”

From the website of KhushiBaby.org

In 2016, IDEMIA, the security firm now working with the French government on vaccination and identity verification, designed the microchip-equipped necklaces. The necklaces have been used to track health data for 13 million people in India since the beginning of the pandemic.

These programs have been marketed by corporate consultants as essential tools for improving equality and inclusion in the Global South. “Digital identification is key to inclusive growth,” claimed McKinsey, the global consulting firm, in 2019.

“Something like 1 billion people could be more financially included and participative,” said Mike Kubzansky, managing partner of Ebay founder and media mogul Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network during a WEF panel exploring how “Digital Identification Provides a Significant Opportunity for Value Creation.”

Like Gates, Omidyar is heavily invested in the advancement of digital ID and currency systems through his Omidyar Network, which collaborates with the World Economic Forum on the Good ID initiative.

#COVID is moving us increasingly towards a cashless society meaning unbanked people who lack formal identification will be excluded.

Could digital identity be the solution?https://t.co/TpgZMW6bXL#GoodID

— #GoodID (@GoodID) November 9, 2020

A closer look at the push for “inclusion” by corporate behemoths reveals their altruistic language as little more than public relations cover for raw profit motives, resulting in marginalization and even death for many of those roped into their digital ID systems.

Besides serving as the staging ground for the Khushi Baby venture, India has become a laboratory for digital tracking and identity systems. With support from Western capitalist outfits like the Gates Foundation and the World Bank, the country has become the site of the world’s largest digital ID database, known as Aadhaar.

The Aadhaar system is named for a 12 digit number that serves as a proof of identity and address, among other markers, anywhere in India. To date, a whopping 1.3 billion Indians have been enrolled in the system, making it the largest biometric ID database ever constructed. It contains iris scans and fingerprints from both hands of each user. The technology for this system was provided by none other than the French security firm IDEMIA.

Nandan Nilekani, creator of the Aadhar digital ID system, with Bill Gates

Aadhaar was implemented in 2014, the year that the free marketeering, tech-centric Narendra Modi entered the prime minister’s office. Its creator, tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani, has been branded “the Bill Gates of Bangalore,” celebrated by globalization enthusiasts like Thomas Friedman, and hailed by none other than Gates as an altruistic “hero.” Gates’ foundation has collaborated with Nilekani through its “Co-impact” project alongside billionaire eBay co-founder Jeffrey Skoll’s Skoll Foundation.

“Aadhaar is a huge asset for India,” effused Gates in a 2019 interview with the Indian network Times Now. “The fact that you can make digital payments and open a bank account so easily, India is a leader in that. There are huge benefits in being able to get digital government money to the beneficiary.”

But behind the neoliberal spin, Nilekani’s Aadhar digital ID system has wreaked havoc on the lives of India’s most vulnerable and stigmatized populations.

In the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, a wave of deaths took place in 2017 when impoverished citizens were cut off from government-subsidized food rations by the Aadhaar system. In several cases, aging widows were denied rice for several months because the system rejected their fingerprint scans.

Around the same time, three brothers died of starvation after they failed to properly register with Aadhaar and were subsequently denied rations for six months. The same cruel fate was visited on the Kumari family, which was unable to obtain an electronic Aadhaar ID, lost its ration card, and saw its 11-year-old daughter, Santoshi, die of hunger.

“Many people in Jharkhand have been victims of similar deprivation of food entitlements during the last few months,” reported India’s Scroll. “The main reason is that Aadhaar-based biometric authentication is now compulsory in about 80% of ration shops in the state.”

According to Scroll, a random sample of 18 villages where biometric authentication was compulsory found that a staggering 37% of cardholders were unable to buy their food rations.

Besides making Aadhaar the key to obtaining government services, the Modi government has integrated data collected by Aadhar to establish a “360-degree database” that “automatically track[s] when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, or buys a new property,” according to the Huffington Post.

When Covid-19 first reached India in early 2020, Nilekani proposed employing Aadhar as the basis for an anti-Covid vaccination and tracking program. “We must ensure that everybody gets a digital certificate with the date of vaccination, name of the vaccine and through which vendor and at what location,” he declared in 2020.

Unsurprisingly, Nilekani’s system of mass surveillance has proven much more effective at harvesting data than it has been at protecting it. In 2018, the Indian Tribune newspaper was able to purchase the personal information of nearly every Aadhaar user through anonymous sellers over WhatsApp. The process took only 10 minutes and cost about $6 USD, the paper reported.

The Tribune “purchased” a service being offered by anonymous sellers over WhatsApp that provided unrestricted access to details for any of the more than 1 billion Aadhaar numbers created in India thus far. https://t.co/UepQkXLPFJ

— Shivam Vij (@DilliDurAst) January 4, 2018

The system’s serial breaches of privacy even prompted some HIV-positive Indians to drop out of antiretroviral treatment programs that require the Aadhaar card. Though the Aadhaar is said to be voluntary, individuals with HIV have complained to Indian media that they were pressured into enrolling into the ID program, and had been threatened with the loss of medical services.

US privacy advocates have pointed to digital national identity programs like Aadhaar as gargantuan surveillance tools that establish the basis for a social credit system.

Addressing the US House Committee on Financial Services in July 2021, Elizabeth Renieris of Notre-Dame’s Technology Ethics Lab warned, “The Aadhaar number in India is able to track your activity across all facets of your life, from employment to healthcare, to school, to pretty much everything you do. You can’t retain autonomy over specific domains of your life. You can’t separate your personal and professional reputation. You can’t have this kind of contextualized personal identity. I think that’s really problematic.”

“We must avoid building digital identity systems and infrastructure in a way that further expands and entrenches the surveillance state, as does the national identity system in India,” Renieris continued.

But it is the all-encompassing social credit aspect of Aadhaar that has made Gates so fond of the system.

Addressing India’s top policy makers in 2016, the world’s second wealthiest man declared, “Over time, all of these transactions create a footprint and so when you go in for credit, the ability to access the history that you’ve paid your utility bills on time, that you’ve saved up money for your children’s education, all of those things in your digital trail, accessed in an appropriate way allow the credit market to [score the risk properly].“

ID4D expands digital ID to track more human activity than ever

In 2016, the Gates Foundation ponied up funding for a World Bank project called the Identity for Development (ID4D) Initiative for the declared purpose of bringing the “Aadhaar approach to other countries.”

To date, the World Bank has invested $1.2 billion into the ID4D initiative, with the official aim of creating “identification systems using 21st Century solutions.”

Among the four financial partners that established the initiative were two familiar Big Tech-backed operations: The Gates Foundation and The Omidyar Network, along with Australian Aid and UK Aid. According to the World Bank, the Gates Foundation’s “catalytic contributions” in particular transformed the project from an idea to a functional World Bank initiative.

Aadhaar’s Nilekani currently sits on the ID4D Initiative advisory council.

According to the World Bank, ID4D “promote[s] the use of digital ID systems for free movement and service delivery, by creating linkages across systems that allow users to authenticate themselves for key services such as receiving social transfer payments, completing financial transactions, and crossing borders.”

Promotional materials frame this venture as a humanitarian cause centered on helping poor women and making sure ”unbanked” individuals (those without a bank account) such as refugees and migrants are included in the modern economy.

Yet a closer look at the initiative’s backers and their agenda reveals a longstanding goal of the captains of global capitalism: creating a digitally centered identity system that enables powerful public and private institutions to track more human activity than ever.

“Digital ID … can be leveraged by government and commercial platforms to facilitate a variety of digital transactions, including digital payments,” explains the World Bank.

In an August 2021 white paper, the World Bank called on African nations to achieve a “single digital market” and loosen regulations on digital infrastructure to lower the risk for investors. The paper revealed the real intentions behind the World Bank’s push for a closure to the digital divide: opening up the continent for foreign investment. “Government regulation,” the paper declared, “needs to smoothen the path to digital transformation in the region.”

“By accelerating Africa’s digital transformation, businesses can reap the benefits,” the World Economic Forum (WEF) proclaimed in a 2020 article titled, “Africa has the potential to boost global growth.”

“There will […] be lucrative opportunities in Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia … a good bet for companies seeking to enter new markets,” the WEF advised.

As the World Economic Forum recently wrote, “COVID-19 has highlighted the advantages of creating a digital economy.” Yet the advantages the group speaks of will likely fall on the side of its stakeholders.

Partners of the World Economic Forum’s “Platform for a Good Digital Identity ” include the biometric ID firm Accenture, Amazon, Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC Bank, Mastercard, the biometric technology firm Simprints, and the credit giant, Visa.

The initiative’s stakeholders represent the key beneficiaries of a biometric ID system imposed on the Global South, with Western multinational financial firms functioning as the gateway for its inhabitants to participate in the global economy.

The WEF has also made clear that the “end goal” of its agenda is expanding the model it established in India until every person in the world holds a unique digital ID.

In an article titled “Digital ID is the Catalyst of Our Digital Future,” Mohit Joshi, a WEF ‘young leader,’ argued that “governments should use [Aadhaar] to streamline the delivery of services and payments, and massively increase financial inclusion.”

In a separate paper, however, the WEF conceded that the new digital system will not necessarily provide users with the liberation they have been promised: “Fourth Industrial Revolution digital identity will determine what products, services, and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us,” the WEF stated.

ID2020 leverages vaccinations to push “beyond dystopian” digital ID’s and payments

Back in 2016, Bill Gates’ Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), Microsoft, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation established a new consortium to provide digital ID certificates to infants when they receive their routine immunizations. They called it ID2020, incidentally naming it for the year that a global pandemic would be declared.

ID2020 says it is “dedicated to spearheading a global digital biometric identity standard,” and claims Digital IDs will lead to “financial independence.”

Yesterday’s #ID2020 is today’s Good Health Pass, is tomorrows Digital Identity for All.#Freedom-As-A-Service

The covid vaccine certificate is the catalyst to drive, unify, & implement a #4IR digital identity global infrastructure.

2016 pic.twitter.com/0MkPamCTvg

— Cory Morningstar (@elleprovocateur) October 2, 2021

Partners in the ID2020 initiative include the credit card giant Mastercard and Simprints, a biometric technology firm supported by the US Agency for International Development, a traditional front organization for US intelligence.

Mastercard’s ‘community pass’ project aims to capture the biometrics of 30 million individuals in remote parts of Africa over the next three years and issue them a Mastercard Community Pass biometric smart card, which will in turn provide Africans with a digital biometric identity and a digital bank account.

ID2020 is currently operating in Bangladesh, where it administers biometric enrollment and digital ID to infants when they receive routine immunizations. GAVI CEO Seth Berkely has said he plans to expand the program across the underdeveloped world, working with mega-corporations such as Facebook and Mastercard to tie vaccination status to a biometric identification system.

“Eighty-nine percent of children and adolescents without identification live in countries supported by Gavi,” Berkley stated. “We are enthusiastic about the potential impact of this program not just in Bangladesh, but as something we can replicate across Gavi-eligible countries.”

With the WHO’s declaration of a global pandemic in March 2020, an unprecedented opportunity arrived for the forces advancing digital IDs. As Andrew Bud, the CEO of biometric tech company and Department of Homeland Security contractor iProov, enthused, “The evolution of vaccine certificates will actually drive the whole field of digital id in the future. So, therefore, this is not just about Covid, this is about something even bigger.”

By the following year, ID2020 and the USAID-partnered biometric ID firm, Simprints, had leveraged funding from Gates Foundation to publish an article entitled, “COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery: An Opportunity to Set Up Systems for the Future.” The authors argued that COVID-19 vaccines in the Global South could be used as a “potential lever” to deliver digital biometric IDs.

They went on to admit that such digital biometric systems would stay in place long after the COVID-19 pandemic was over, and would be exploited for an array of purposes after the rollout: “Biometrics have the advantage of being agnostic to use case,” the co-authors wrote, “meaning they can connect different systems during or even after rollout.”

From Simprints.com

Elizabeth Renieris of the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab resigned from a technical advisory role on ID2020, citing “risks to civil liberties” after the initiative teamed up with tech giants to design COVID immunity passports backed up by experimental blockchain technology.

Renieris went on to denounce the burgeoning ID system as a civil liberties nightmare: “The prospect of severely curtailing the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals through ill-thought-out plans for ‘immunity passports’ or similar certificates, particularly ones that would leverage premature standards and a highly experimental and potentially rights-infringing technology like blockchain, is beyond dystopian.”

Digital ID mavens prey on the global poor

While linking a digital biometric ID to individuals’ finances is almost certain to exclude masses of people, and has even killed some by cutting impoverished citizens off from government services, predatory financial and credit institutions see the technology as the perfect means for capitalizing on untapped and developing markets.

A September 2021 report by BankservAfrica, the largest automated digital payments clearinghouse in Africa, which is headed by former executives at MasterCard, VISA, and IBM, urged South Africa to adopt a biometric digital ID system.

The report proclaimed, “The time has come for consumers, investors, and the private and public sectors to work collectively to achieve the common goal of enabling a robust, secure, and trusted digital identity for South Africa.”

BankServAfrica’s digital payment platform is currently being tested in Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania with financial support from the World Bank, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown just how critical a digital ID is,” BankServAfrica’s Chief Business Officer insisted.

BankservAfrica’s report argued that a robust biometric digital ID system will help South Africa achieve “simpler FICA [credit score] processes” and “a fair, transparent, competitive, sustainable, responsible, efficient and effective consumer credit market.”

But behind the lofty neoliberal rhetoric deployed by the financial industry lies a sordid record of profiteering and privacy invasion on a massive scale.

In 2007, Vodafone and Safaricom launched mPesa, a system that allows users to digitally deposit, withdraw, transfer, and pay with money. The project was “able to make credit and growth capital available to millions of people who have never had access to credit before,” according to Areiel Wolanow, who led the team that designed and built the credit scoring engine for mPesa in Kenya.

But a study by economist Alan Gibson revealed that it was the financial sector – not the rural population of the Global South – that truly benefited from mPesa. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the system’s mostly impoverished participants failed to improve at all:

“What is indisputable is that the supply-side of the finance market has benefited greatly from the last ten years. Banks’ sales have increased by 2.5 times and profits by 3.5 times, with profit margins also increased; the inclusion years have undoubtedly been good years for the banks. This apparent contrast between conspicuous supply-side success and a still-poor economy … raises questions on the role of the finance sector. In particular, it begs questions on who/what it is there to serve, and on the incentives that drive behavior.”

In a further indictment of supposedly “inclusive” digital payment schemes, the Review of African Political Economy found that “the bulk of this [mPesa] value does not go to the poor. Rather, such fintech is very clearly designed to hoover up value and deposit it into the hands of a narrow global digital-financial elite that are the main forces behind the fintech revolution.”

Despite the evidence of widening inequality, Bill Gates – whose foundation spends hundreds of billions of dollars promoting digital financial services for the poor – gushed praise for mPesa.

“M-Pesa is an excellent program,” Gates effused on Twitter in one of several tweets hailing the digital payments system.

Gates linked to an article promoting the program by NPR, the US public broadcaster which has received upwards of $17.5 million from Gates while producing hundreds of articles praising the tech billionaire and his initiatives around the world.

Back in the US, meanwhile, Gates’ ID2020 campaign has collaborated with the forces advancing a system that registers Americans’ vaccination status with the same corporation that calculates their financial credit score.

The US credit industry and digital immunity ID outfits collaborate on “huge opportunities for the commercial sector”

In Illinois, residents are currently required to verify that they have received the COVID-19 vaccine through an online portal called Vax Verify which will work in concert with Chicago’s soon-to-be-implemented vaccine passport.

To register their proof of vaccination, Illinois residents must turn to Experian, the world’s leading credit score service.

Already, the Vax Verify portal is facing backlash for providing inaccurate vaccine status information. It is also the subject of serious security concerns given Experian’s record of breaches that leaked the personal data of millions of citizens from Brazil to South Africa.

Further, the online portal requires that any resident with a freeze on their credit must unfreeze it with Experian before registering a vaccination.

“Using Experian is definitely one of the worst [vaccine passports] I’ve seen yet,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock commented to Yahoo News.

After Illinois became the first US state to forge a formal relationship between vaccine certifications and Experian, Illinois Congressman and financial industry darling Bill Foster introduced legislation that would foist a digital biometric ID onto the entire American population.

The Improving Digital Identity Act of 2021, introduced by Foster in July, calls for the public sector, and particularly the Department of Homeland Security, to work with the private sector to develop a new biometric digital ID infrastructure for the United States.

In November 2020, the Gates-sponsored ID2020 provided an online forum for Foster to promote his bill. During the event, the congressman advocated for a “trusted biometric digital immunity certificate system” while explaining that his bill would obtain biometrics from every citizen so private corporations could then “leverage” it to generate enormous profits.

Rep. Bill Foster headlined the Gates-backed ID2020’s November 2020 webinar

“Once the government has [taken] those fairly serious biometrics from you – there will be huge opportunities for the commercial sector to leverage that,” he said. “And to try to get this all started, I introduced the ‘Improving Digital ID Act.’”

Banking and credit card companies are among the many “commercial sectors” that Foster’s bill will benefit through digital biometric IDs. The bill plainly states that the corporate ID system will give “under-banked and unbanked individuals better access to digital financial services,” cloaking the opening of markets for finance giants in the same woke language that ID4D and ID2020 employ.

But as tech oligarchs and their partners in the financial and national security industries leverage the coronavirus epidemic to institute a lucrative apparatus of digital monitoring, dissent is erupting in the countries where vaccine passports have begun to exclude millions.

Protests erupt against vaccine passports and “people who have very little to do with parliament”

In New York City – ground zero of the US vaccination passport roll-out – where over 80 percent of all Covid social distancing arrests were conducted against Black residents in 2020, simmering tensions boiled over when three Black diners initiated a brawl with staff at Carmine’s, an Upper West Side restaurant that prevented them from dining without their vaccination proof.

The incident spurred condemnation from a local Black Lives Matter chapter, which accused city authorities of exploiting mask mandates and vaccine passports to exclude and incarcerate Black residents. “What we are seeing here is the NYPD and restaurants using vaccination proof as a reason to discriminate against Black people,” declared BLM activist Kimberly Bernard.

“We will not sit by and allow you to use this pandemic, for you to use vaccination cards, for you to use masks as another reason to be racist” said BLM Activist Kimberly Bernard, co-founder of Black Women’s March, during Cancel Carmines protest in NYC. pic.twitter.com/RS5gtoHugN

— Scootercaster (@ScooterCasterNY) September 24, 2021

France has been the site of some of the world’s largest protests against the vaccine passport system imposed under the watch of former banker and President Emanuel Macron. On August 14, over 210,000 people took to the streets in over 200 protests across France against the nascent biomedical security regime.

Puncturing the corporate media’s pigeonholing of the demonstrators as far-right shock troops, France’s Le Monde described them as “alone, coupled up, here with their family or friends, of all ages, white, Black, employed, retired, some vaccinated, others who refuse to get the shot.”

French journalist Pauline Bock noted that in her country, “the only trade that’s exempt from mandatory vaccination — the police — will be the one to make sure everyone else obeys. The policy is ripe for authoritarian misuse.”

In Italy, meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister and former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has mandated that all employees of both public and private businesses produce a Green Pass proving vaccination in order to enter their place of work.

The Green Pass vaccine passport system has already excluded unvaccinated individuals from restaurants, gyms, as well as trains, buses and domestic flights across the country. Official government numbers show the pass has failed to increase vaccine uptake.

With the expansion of the Green Pass to places of work, Italians have risen up in some of the largest protests the world has seen against the nascent biosecurity regime.

Enorme manifestazione a Roma contro l’obbligo del passaporto sanitario: “La gente come noi non molla mai!” pic.twitter.com/517qxac7ki

— RadioGenova (@RadioGenova) October 9, 2021

On October 9, hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into Italian streets from Rome to Trento to voice their rejection of Draghi’s policy. In Rome, where police repressed peaceful demonstrators with batons and riot shields, a group of about 20 far-right hooligans attacked a local union office while police stood by. Interior Minister Carlo Sibilia exploited the incident to claim that “neo-fascist groups hide behind the so-called anti-vaxxers.”

The secretary of a faction of Italy’s Communist Party, Marco Rizzo, who has condemned the passport system as “a discriminatory, divisive tool that pits one against the other,” cast suspicion on the incident.

ROME PROTESTS . “The union building usually closed on a Saturday was strangely open. In this video you can see people who we believe are police changing into black clothes to incite violence and indicate ‘violent blackshirts fascist protesters’.” h/t Robin Monotti pic.twitter.com/ZO71hsfsbu

— Club des Cordeliers (@cordeliers) October 13, 2021

In an October 10 statement, Rizzo warned that the incident of “fascist violence” the day before played directly into the hands of the neoliberal government, and questioned whether a new “strategy of tension” was in play. The communist leader was referring to the Italian state’s covert weaponization of far-right militants during the 1970’s “years of lead” to foment violence and neutralize Marxist organizations.

The demonstrations have now spread to the port city of Trieste, where union dock workers have refused to offload goods until the Green Pass is revoked. On October 18, Italian police attempted to break the workers’ strike with water cannons, tear gas, and heavy repression.

La mattanza al porto di Trieste. pic.twitter.com/KG9qD17g72

— RadioGenova (@RadioGenova) October 18, 2021

Two days before anti-Green Pass protests exploded across Italy, the renowned philosopher Giorgio Agamben appeared before the Italian Senate’s Constitutional Affairs Commission to issue a dramatic statement of opposition to the Green Pass.

Agamben is most famous for his concept of Homo Sacer, or bare life, in which an individual is stripped of rights and reduced to their biological essence in an extra-legal regime justified by war or other emergencies. When Italian authorities declared the first lockdown in March 2020, the philosopher applied the theory to his own country’s heavy-handed restrictions.

“The defining feature…of this great transformation that they are attempting to impose is that the mechanism which renders it formally possible is not a new body of laws, but a state of exception – in other words, not an affirmation of, but the suspension of constitutional guarantees,” the philosopher explained in the foreword to his collection of 2020 writings on Covid-19, “Where Are We Now: The Epidemic As Politics,”

In his remarks before the Italian Senate, Agamben pointed to a sinister agenda behind the official rationale for vaccine passports: “It has been said by scientists and doctors that the Green Pass has no medical significance in itself but serves to force people to get vaccinated. Instead, I think we must say the opposite: that the vaccine is a means of forcing people to have the Green Pass. That is, a device that allows individuals to be monitored and tracked, an unprecedented measure.”

The philosopher concluded his address by taking aim at the supra-national forces – Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and Rockefeller Foundation, among others – determined to impose a system of digital identification and high-tech social credit as much of the human population as possible.

“I believe that in this perspective,” Agamben warned, “it is more urgent than ever for parliamentarians to consider the political transformation underway, which in the long run is destined to empty parliament of its powers, reducing it to simply approving – in the name of bio-security – decrees emanating from organizations and people who have very little to do with parliament.”

thegrayzone.com

President Biden has decided to go hard on the virus. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Sadly for him, those tiny little pathogens don’t pay taxes, don’t vote, don’t have Social Security numbers, can’t be drafted, and don’t answer phone calls from poll takers, which is to say that he and his agencies cannot really control them. That must be frustrating, poor man.

Instead his plan is to control what he can control: people, and, most immediately, federal workers and the employees of large regulated companies. For him, the key to crushing the virus is the vaccine. Not enough people are obeying his demand for near-universal vaccination.

In a maniacal move of wild desperation – or as an excuse to try out the most extreme powers of his office – he is using every weapon that he believes he has to assure compliance with his dream of injecting as many arms as possible. Only then will we crush the virus, all thanks to his leadership, all the complaints about “freedom” be damned – and never mind that the realization of his dream did not work in Israel or the UK.

What are the immediate problems here? At least five:

1. The Biden mandate pretends that the only immunity is injected, not natural. And so it has been from the beginning of this pandemic, even though all science for at least a year – actually you can say centuries – contradicts that. Indeed, we’ve known about natural immunity since 400 B.C when Thucydides first wrote of the great Athens plague that revealed that “they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension.” Biden’s mandate could affect 80 million people but far more than that have likely been exposed and gained robust immunity regardless of vaccination status.

2. This natural immunity is long-lasting and broad, and we’ve known that since last year when the first studies revealed it. You can say that the addition of a vaccine provides even more but it’s new and untested relative to most drugs approved by regulators, and many people are concerned about possible side effects of this vaccine that was approved much faster than any drug in my lifetime – and there is not one living human being in a position to say with certainty that these skeptics are wrong.

3. The mandate presumes that everyone is equally susceptible to severe outcomes from getting exposed to the virus, which we’ve known is not true since at least February 2020. In this entire 18-month fiasco, we’ve not seen any serious high-level communication about the huge range of demographic gradients in infection based on both age and overall health. This ignorance is a consequence of poor public-health messaging, and is grossly irresponsible. The aggregated mandate from the Biden administration ignores this completely, as did the models that suggested lockdowns in the event of a virus from the Spring of 2020.

4. Biden seems still of the belief that vaccines stop infection (he claimed this many times) and spread but we know with certainty that this is not the case, and even the CDC admits it. The best guess at this point is that it can help in preventing hospitalization and death but this experiment is still in its early stages, and the relationship between cause and effect in human affairs is not as easy as throwing around two data sets and saying one caused the other. Most cases in the developed world now are occurring among the vaccinated – and we all know this because we have vaccinated friends who got Covid anyway. Some have died. We are not idiots, contrary to what the Biden administration believes. Nor do any of us have all the knowledge and answers. And it is precisely because science is uncertain that the decisions surrounding it need to be decentralized, depoliticized, and open to correction rather than being imposed by top-down mandates.

5. Biden’s order flies in the face of basic human freedoms and rights. There is no other way to put it. And it is this fact that is the most prescient for the multitudes who are right now seething in anger that one man who happens to hold power can make health decisions for the whole population regardless of their perfectly rational judgements. When the needle filled with liquid is forced into the arms of people who either have natural immunities or do not fear exposure to the pathogen, it gets personal, and people get really mad, especially after they are still forced into masks and denied other essential rights.

Truth is that my phone has been blowing up all evening since Biden’s speech. People are demoralized, panicked, furious, and even at the point of losing it completely over this despotic moment in which we are living. Most of us believed that we live in a scientific age in which information would be broadly disseminated to the world and this technology would somehow prevent us as a society from falling prey to charlatans, mob mysticism, and brutal methods of population control, not to mention to the deployment of superstitious talismans and quackery. That turns out not to be true, and this is perhaps the greatest shock of all.

Scientists worked for many hundreds of years to understand pathogens. They worked to understand their effect on the body, the range of susceptibility to both infection and severe outcomes, the demographics of vulnerability, the means by which we come to be protected from them, and the opportunities and limits available to people to protect themselves and others. After all this, humanity put together institutions that protected human freedom, individual rights, and public health, while preserving peace and prosperity in the best of times.

In the last 18 months, all that hard work and knowledge seems to have been shredded, replaced by superstition masquerading as some kind of new science of social and pathogenic control. In this year and a half, we’ve observed no clear successes and unrelenting flops. One year ago, humanity had the opportunity to embrace the wisdom of the Great Barrington Declaration to protect the vulnerable while letting society otherwise function. Governments instead chose the path of ignorance and violence. The list is long but it includes: travel restrictions, capacity limits, business closures, school shutdowns, mask mandates, forced human separation (“social distancing”), and now mandates of vaccination that, quite apparently, vast numbers do not want.

It’s all designed so that governments can prove to the world that they are powerful enough, smart enough, educated enough to outsmart and manage any living organism, even an invisible one that has been part of the human experience since humans had experiences. In this, they have completely failed – in more ways than it is possible to count.

We keep thinking that surely, surely, we will come to the end of this madness. I personally believed it would end the second week of March 2020. Instead, it gets worse and worse, the illusion of control having seized the barely functioning brains of the ruling classes of the world’s richest nations. If this doesn’t prove the astonishing stupidity of the world’s most powerful and educated, nothing else in history does.

The great myth that has clouded our vision and our expectations has been that we as a people had progressed beyond the kind of statist shibelboths and fanatic brutality that define our age. The truth is that we are not.

This very day, a Karen attacked me for being maskless. I looked at her and thought only of the poor people in Colonial America who dared being caught wearing buckled shoes and therefore running afoul of the sumptuary laws, or of the religious minorities in Medieval Europe who were scapegoated for every plague (look up the origins of the the phrase “poisoning the well”), or the demonization of rebels in the ancient Roman empire or the disapprobation of heretics in the hundreds of years that followed the fall of Rome.

It is a mark of a primitive society to attribute to political compliance or noncompliance what rational science shows is a feature of the natural world. Why? Ignorance, maybe. Power ambitions, more likely. Scapegoating is apparently an eternal feature of the human experience. Governments seem particularly good at it, even when it is less believable than ever.

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If it were possible to say with absolute scientific authority that vaccinations are the best way for the planet to escape from the Covid-19 death grip, then it might seem plausible – albeit still highly arguable – for governments to demand proof of ‘the mark’ for participating in the global economy. As things stand, however, nothing to date indicates that there are not more effective and reliable means of moving forward.

The relentless push for vaccine passports by opportunistic authoritarians around the globe took a broadside this week as Israeli researchers discovered what had been suspected by many all along: natural immunity acquired via infection, as opposed to vaccinations, provides the best defense against Covid-19 and its seemingly endless array of Greek-coded variants.

The study, which examined up to 32,000 individuals, found that the risk of developing Covid-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated (with the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine), and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher, as compared to those individuals who had acquired natural immunity.

Equally shocking, individuals who were administered two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-times more likely to contract the Delta variation and seven-times more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered from the disease naturally, according to the study, which is up for peer review.

“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the delta variant,” the researchers said.

So what grounds are left for forcing vaccine passports on people? The simple answer would seem ‘none.’ As a thought experiment, let’s imagine that a radical new mode of transportation still in the early test stages – perhaps some brainchild from the quirky mind of Elon Musk, for example – had proven to have a better than average chance of exploding for no apparent reason.

Under such grim conditions it is doubtful that governments would coerce their subjects into driving such a flawed vehicle since the product itself would be deemed too dangerous to enter the mainstream. So why isn’t the same sort of logic being employed when it comes to being forced to carry a vaccine passport for a vaccine, which has also demonstrated itself to be dodgy at best, disastrous at worst?

The efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine in treating the Delta strain has been measured at just 42 percent, and in some cases even as low as 17 percent. At the same time, thousands of otherwise healthy people have suffered horrible side effects after taking these jabs, up to and including death.

Australian journalist Denham Hitchcock is one of thousands of people who got much more than he bargained for when he got the shot.

“The first week was like any vaccine. Feeling off,” Hitchcock wrote on his Instagram page.

“But nearing the end of the second week my heart started to race, I was getting pins and needles in the arms, extreme fatigue and a very strange sensation of dizziness…By the end of the third week i was getting steadily worse – sharp chest pain – cold shivers and chills – and the dizziness was intense.

“25 days after the shot and probably a little late to hospital – but here I am – diagnosed with pericarditis – or inflammation of the heart due to the Pfizer vaccine.”

Since being in the hospital, Hitchcock says he’s contacted health professionals in Sydney who told him that while his reaction to the vaccine is rare – it’s certainly not isolated.

“One hospital has had well over a dozen cases like me,” he revealed.

 

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Публикация от Denham Hitchcock (@denhamhitchcock)

Meanwhile, a coroner this week has determined that the death of Lisa Shaw, who worked for BBC Radio Newcastle and passed away in May, was “due to complications of an AstraZeneca Covid vaccination.”

And lest anyone think the Moderna vaccine is without its own problems, Japan this week removed around 1.6 million vials of the vaccine from use after contamination was reported by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. While such things do occasionally happen, the ministry revealed that the substance found in the vials “reacted to magnets and…could be metal.”

Moderna suggested the problem may have come from a “manufacturing issue” from a plant in Spain.

“The company is investigating the reports and remains committed to working transparently and expeditiously with its partner, Takeda, and regulators to address any potential concerns,” a Moderna spokesperson told Nikkei, saying the drugmaker believed a “manufacturing issue” at a plant in Spain was to blame.

Incidentally, the very inventor of the mRNA vaccines, Dr. Robert Malone, who could be providing governments much-needed guidance during the pandemic, has largely been shunned from polite society from the Western hemisphere’s very own medical Taliban as a conspiracy theorist who peddles in “misinformation.”

When we finally get past all of this, the legitimacy of both the federal public health infrastructure and the legacy media will have been destroyed. And what happens then? Force your mind to think 9-12 months ahead. What do things look like then, based on current trends?

— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) August 27, 2021

Getting back to Pfizer, its own lackluster performance apparently means little to regulators as the drug maker just won approval by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to administer its vaccine, which will be distributed under the brand name Comirnaty. Now pressure will certainly ratchet up against those who have second thoughts about the magic juice as many public and private institutions – from schools and workplaces to government agencies – push for a mandatory vaccine regime. This would include society’s youngest and most vulnerable demographic, the children.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for example, is pressuring the National Health Service to begin vaccinating children as young as 12, and despite the fact that the youth have shown amazing imperviousness to the virus. The UK looks set to join the United States, Spain, France and Germany as countries where inoculating the young is quickly becoming standard operating procedure – and with zero democratic debate.

Nobody, however, should be led to believe that things will return to normal once everyone has rolled up their sleeves for the shot. After all, these ‘vaccines’ do not prevent people from getting infected by Covid, and, as studies have shown, may actually precipitate infection. This shocking shortcoming of the jabs, far from sidelining their use in favor of other preventive measures, has allowed the vaccine makers to roll out an endless supply of booster shots, as gleefully discussed at a recent Pfizer stockholder meeting.

Albert Bourla, Pfizer Chairman of the Board & CEO, remarked that “the dynamics in the COVID more and more indicate a potential that we will have a clearly repeated business…Now we still don’t have data about the immunity of our vaccine because it is early. But we do see that the people that have the disease, more and more publications indicate that after several months, the immune response goes down. So there is a need to boost.” Those giddy remarks were made back in February, before the Pfizer vaccine has acquired FDA approval.

In other words, the sky is the limit for Big Pharma as far as profits from vaccinations go. And despite the inherent risks of getting the jab, the Western world’s assembly of petty tyrants, short-sighted leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden are pushing ahead with plans for vaccine passports.

Such an initiative, which flies in the face of freedom and liberty, denies individuals the right to refuse medical treatment – and treatment that is loaded with unacceptable risk. And just because one of the drug makers has secured FDA approval for their product, this will not help individuals who are injured, or worse, from the vaccines. The drug makers are indemnified from any lawsuits that may arise from the victims of their product.

This dire situation has placed the citizens of so-called democracies into the unenviable situation where they must choose between signing up to a lifetime of imperfect shots and boosters to participate in a large swath of the economy, or remain something of a social pariah for the rest of their lives. It is a choice that no citizen of a democratic system should ever be forced to make.

For most of the first half of 2021, the vast majority of Americans believed that the COVID pandemic was nearly over.  But now the Delta variant has changed everything.  We are being told that the number of confirmed cases is absolutely skyrocketing, and new mandates and restrictions are now being instituted all over the nation.  If the number of newly confirmed cases each day continues to rise, could we also see a return of widespread lockdowns and school closings?  Such a notion would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago, but now the Biden administration is openly admitting that it is a possibility…

White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that the Biden administration will continue to “listen to the scientists” when it comes to potential future lockdowns and school closures.

And as he was leaving for Camp David on Friday, Joe Biden made another comment which has a lot of people wondering what is coming next…

President Joe Biden signaled the onset of more restrictions to stem the spread of COVID-19 as the highly contagious delta variant rips through the nation.

While departing for Camp David on Friday, the commander in chief shouted a response to a reporter who asked if people should expect tougher constraints than what’s already been implemented.

“In all probability,” he replied.

Of course Joe Biden does not have the authority to order lockdowns in every state.

Ultimately, it will be up to individual state governors to order new lockdowns, but if the Biden administration recommends lockdowns most of them will fall in line.

In addition, on Thursday Biden seemed to suggest that the idea of some sort of a nationwide vaccine mandate is being explored…

Asked about doing even more to get people vaccinated through mandates by states, localities, and businesses, Biden said he wants them to ‘continue to move in that direction.’

He also didn’t rule out the idea of a national mandate, though he wouldn’t vouch for the authority. ‘It’s still a question of whether the federal government can mandate the whole country. I don’t know that yet.’

Such a mandate would surely be challenged in court, but as CNN has explained, the Biden administration may not need to issue a nationwide mandate because so many private employers are now mandating the vaccine…

The CNN article, however, contends it may not even be necessary for the federal government to do something as radical as mandating the vaccine, suggesting it may become nearly impossible to participate in everyday life without one if employers, stores, and hospitals impose requirements one by one.

“The federal government may not try to force people to get the Covid vaccine,” the report reads. “And it may not have to.”

“Your employer, the restaurant where you want to eat, the concert venue you want to visit or the country where you want to travel may do it for them,” it adds.

At this point, many of the biggest employers in America have already pulled the trigger.

Walmart is the largest employer in the country, and on Friday they announced a very strict new vaccine policy…

Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon said Friday the retailer’s corporate staff as well as its management-level employees must be vaccinated against Covid-19 by Oct. 4, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.

The mandate applies to all home office associates, in addition to market, regional and divisional employees who work in multiple facilities, the nation’s largest private employer said.

Disney also announced a very broad vaccine mandate on Friday…

The Walt Disney Company said Friday it is requiring all salaried and non-union hourly employees in the U.S. to be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus by the end of September.

Employees who are still working from home will be required to provide verification of vaccination prior to returning to any Disney sites, including theme parks and offices.

Many big tech companies are jumping on board as well.  For example, Facebook will be requiring “anyone coming to work” to be vaccinated…

Facebook will require U.S. workers returning to its offices to be vaccinated, the company said on Wednesday.

“As our offices reopen, we will be requiring anyone coming to work at any of our US campuses to be vaccinated,” VP of People Lori Goler said in a statement.

Needless to say, people that refuse to take the vaccines will find their employment options increasingly limited in the months ahead.

Meanwhile we received some very interesting news about the Delta variant on Friday.  The following comes from CNBC…

About three-fourths of people infected in a Massachusetts Covid-19 outbreak were fully vaccinated against the coronavirus with four of them ending up in the hospital, according to new data published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new data, published in the U.S. agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also found that fully vaccinated people who get infected carry as much of the virus in their nose as unvaccinated people, and could spread it to other individuals.

Sadly, these numbers from Massachusetts appear to fit very well with a pattern that is emerging nationwide.  The following comes from NBC News…

At least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive for Covid and 1,400 of those have died, according to data collected by NBC News.

Those numbers are really shocking.

So how bad will things get in the months ahead?

Many Americans had been hoping for a return to normalcy, but as I keep warning, our world is only going to get even weirder in the years ahead.

At this point, we have entered a chapter in our history when change is happening faster than ever before.

In particular, this pandemic has radically transformed our society in a very short period of time, and it has become clear that it isn’t even close to being over.

endoftheamericandream.com

Pfizer has been accused of “bullying” Latin American governments during negotiations to acquire its Covid-19 vaccine, and the company has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases, according to an investigation by the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

In the case of one Latin American country, demands made by the pharmaceutical giant led to a three-month delay in a vaccine deal being reached. For Argentina and Brazil, no national deals were agreed to at all with Pfizer. Any hold-up in countries receiving vaccines can lead to more people contracting Covid-19 and potentially dying.

Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded more than the usual indemnity against civil claims filed by citizens who suffer serious adverse events after being inoculated. They said Pfizer also insisted the governments cover the potential costs of civil cases brought as a result of Pfizer’s own acts of negligence, fraud, or malice. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.

Campaigners are already warning of a “vaccine apartheid” in which rich Western countries may be inoculated years before lower-income regions. Now, legal experts have raised concerns that Pfizer’s demands amount to an abuse of power.

Protection against liability shouldn’t be used as “the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of desperate countries with a desperate population,” he added.

Pfizer, which partnered with BioNTech, a German biotech, to make the vaccine, has been in talks with more than 100 countries and international bodies, and has supply agreements with nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. The terms of those deals are unknown.

Pfizer declined to comment on the allegations about its demands in negotiations, citing “ongoing negotiations which are private and confidential.”

The company told the Bureau in a statement: “Pfizer and BioNTech are firmly committed to working with governments and other relevant stakeholders to ensure equitable and affordable access to our COVID-19 vaccine for people around the world.” The company said that in addition to the nine Latin American countries with which it has struck supply agreements, it has “allocated doses to low- and lower-middle-income countries at a not-for-profit price, including an advance purchase agreement with COVAX to provide up to 40 million doses in 2021.” COVAX is a global initiative to pool purchasing power and ensure vaccine access for low-income countries. “We are committed to supporting efforts aimed at providing developing countries with the same access to vaccines as the rest of the world,” Pfizer said.

Most governments are offering indemnity — exemption from legal liability — to the vaccine manufacturers they are buying from. This means that a citizen who suffers an adverse event after being vaccinated can file a claim against the manufacturer and, if successful, the government would pay the compensation. In some countries people can also apply for compensation through specific structures without going to court.

This is fairly typical for vaccines administered in a pandemic. In many cases, adverse events are so rare that they do not show up in clinical trials and only become apparent once hundreds of thousands of people have received the vaccine (a 2009 H1N1 flu vaccine, for example, was eventually linked to narcolepsy). Because manufacturers have developed vaccines quickly and because they protect everyone in society, governments often agree to cover the cost of compensation.

However, the government officials from Argentina and the unnamed country who spoke to the Bureau said Pfizer’s demands went beyond those of other vaccine companies, and beyond those of COVAX, which is also requiring its member countries to indemnify manufacturers. This presents an additional burden for some countries because it means having to hire specialist lawyers, and sometimes pass complex new legislation, so manufacturers’ liabilities can be waived.

‘An extreme demand’

Pfizer asked for an additional indemnity from civil cases, meaning that the company would not be held liable for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice. This includes those linked to company practices — say, if Pfizer sent the wrong vaccine or made errors during manufacturing.

“Some liability protection is warranted, but certainly not for fraud, gross negligence, mismanagement, failure to follow good manufacturing practices,” said Gostin. “Companies have no right to ask for indemnity for these things.”

Mark Eccleston-Turner, a lecturer in global health law at Keele University in England, said Pfizer and other manufacturers have received government funding to research and develop the vaccines and are now pushing the potential costs of adverse effects back on to governments, including those in low- and middle-income countries. (Pfizer’s partner, BioNTech, was given $445 million by the German government to develop a vaccine and the U.S. government agreed in July to preorder 100 million doses for nearly $2 billion, before the vaccine had even entered Phase 3 trials. Pfizer expects to make sales of $15 billion worth of vaccines in 2021.)

In Eccleston-Turner’s opinion, it looks like Pfizer “is trying to eke out as much profit and minimize its risk at every juncture with this vaccine development then this vaccine rollout. Now, the vaccine development has been heavily subsidized already. So there’s very minimal risk for the manufacturer involved there.”

The Bureau spoke to officials from two countries, who all described how meetings with Pfizer began promisingly but quickly turned sour, and reviewed a report by the Brazilian Ministry of Health.

The Argentinian Ministry of Health began negotiating with the company in June and President Alberto Fernández held a meeting with the company’s general manager for Argentina the following month. During subsequent meetings Pfizer asked to be indemnified against the cost of any future civil claims, said an official from the president’s office. Although this had never been done before, the country’s Congress passed a new law in October allowing for it. However, Pfizer was not happy with the phrasing of the legislation, according to the official, who declined to be identified because the negotiations were confidential. The government believed Pfizer should be liable for any acts of negligence or malice. Pfizer, said the official, disagreed.

The government did offer to amend the existing law to make it clear “negligence” meant problems in the distribution and delivery of the vaccines. But Pfizer was still not satisfied. It asked the government to amend the legislation through a new decree; Fernández refused.

“Argentina could compensate for the vaccine’s adverse effects, but not if Pfizer makes a mistake,” said the official, who has detailed knowledge of the negotiations. “For example, what would happen if Pfizer unintentionally interrupted the vaccine’s cold chain [of -70 Celsius during transport and storage] … and a citizen wants to sue them? It would not be fair for Argentina to pay for a Pfizer error.”

The official said talks soon became tense and complicated: “Instead of giving in on some points, Pfizer demanded more and more.” In addition to the changes sought in the new law, it asked Argentina to take out international insurance to pay for potential future cases against the company (countries were also asked by vaccine makers and the WHO to do this during the H1N1 outbreak).

In late December, Pfizer made another unexpected request: that the government put up sovereign assets — which might include federal bank reserves, embassy buildings, or military bases — as collateral.

“We offered to pay millions of doses in advance, we accepted this international insurance, but the last request was unusual: Pfizer demanded that the sovereign assets of Argentina also be part of the legal support,” the official said. “It was an extreme demand that I had only heard when the foreign debt had to be negotiated, but both in that case and in this one, we rejected it immediately.”

The failed negotiations mean Argentinian citizens, unlike those in neighboring countries, do not have access to Pfizer’s vaccine, leaving them with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, AstraZeneca’s vaccine, and those delivered through COVAX. The government is also negotiating to acquire vaccines from Moderna, Sinopharm, and CanSino.

“Pfizer misbehaved with Argentina,” said Ginés González Garcia, Argentina’s former minister of health. “Its intolerance with us was tremendous.”

‘Good cop, bad cop’

The same demands were made of Brazil’s Ministry of Health, according to a ministry statement. Pfizer asked to be indemnified against all civil claims and asked the ministry to put up sovereign assets as collateral, as well as create a guarantee fund with money deposited in a foreign bank account. In January, the ministry refused these terms, describing the clauses as “abusive.”

An official from the Latin American country that cannot be named described talks unfolding similarly. This person said the government began negotiating with Pfizer in July, before the vaccine was approved. There was a perception that Pfizer’s negotiators had a “good cop, bad cop” routine, with the “bad cop” pressing the government to buy more doses.

“[At that time] there was not a single drug or vaccine in the world with this kind of technology that had been shown to be safe and effective. … You had this lady putting pressure saying: ‘Buy more, you’re going to kill people, people are going to die because of you,’” the official said.

Negotiations became fraught when the company asked for additional indemnity, for civil cases alleging Pfizer’s acts of negligence, fraud, or malice. The government had never awarded any kind of indemnity before and did not want to waive liability, but Pfizer said this was non-negotiable. Negotiations continued and eventually a deal was signed that included the additional indemnity provisions, but after a delay of three months.

As Pfizer has only 2 billion doses to sell across the world this year — apparently on a first-come, first-served basis — the official is angry about a delay that likely pushed the country further back in the queue.

One of the reasons the government wanted Pfizer’s vaccines was because the company said they could be delivered quickly. Yet in the contract, Pfizer wanted to reserve the right to modify the schedule. There was no room for negotiation. “It was take it or leave it,” said the official.

The official added: “Five years in the future when these confidentiality agreements are over, you will learn what really happened in these negotiations.”

Based in the U.K., the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is an independent, not-for-profit organization. This story was produced by its Global Health desk.

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