Act now America: Say NO to vaccine passports

Passports usher in a new era of segregation and medical apartheid and must be opposed.

Published: Jul 21, 2023

Our Stand: At-A-Glance

Countries around the world are rolling out plans for vaccine passports, certificates showing proof of vaccination for COVID-19. The aim of these documents is to afford certain basic privileges and living necessities to vaccinated individuals only; for example, the ability to work and travel, receive government benefits like food or rent assistance, or attend concerts and sporting events.
Vaccine passports are already being used in countries like Israel, where the government was able to very quickly create a second-class citizenry though entitlements that are only extended to a certain subset of the population, regardless of their health status (vaccination does not equal bona fide immunity, nor does lack of one mean that you’ll make others sick). Some have dubbed it “a true medical apartheid” that’s disallowing healthy, law-abiding citizens from participating in society if they choose not to receive the experimental COVID-19 jab.
In the United States, the Biden administration is presently working with private-sector technology companies to develop a vaccine passport model. Although the United States and other governments are touting “health passports” as vital tools that will restore normalcy and allow countries to reopen safely, the passports are coming under intense scrutiny by medical ethicists and others alarmed by the breach of privacy and informed consent.
It’s unacceptable to restrict the rights of individuals based on their personal health decisions or vaccine status. It’s even more egregious to discriminate against those who refuse to receive an experimental vaccine that’s not even FDA approved, has documented safety concerns, and for which there is basically no recourse in the event of injury or death.
The CDC, which issues official guidance that’s quickly adopted at all levels of government and by the private sector, is now making recommendations to loosen lockdown measures and grant certain privileges to those who have received the COVID-19 jab. Those who don’t get it, including individuals who are known to be at risk of harm from the vaccine, are being denied such privileges. This is medical segregation/apartheid at the behest of an agency that’s heavily influenced by pharmaceutical industry interests. Such a practice does not belong in a free society and is reflective of Nazi-era government efforts to segregate “inferior” or “diseased” members of society who were eventually confined or exterminated.
Vaccine passports are not inevitable! They will only work if 1) the vast majority of people willingly get the COVID-19 vaccine and 2) citizens consent to public and private institutions requiring them to access their goods and services. If those who stand firm in their convictions don’t succumb to the enormous pressure that’s being exerted on all of us, the program will fail. We urge you to stand up for your right to decline an experimental medical intervention and to say no to any form of coercion that attempts to tie vaccination to rights like gainful employment, school attendance or access to public spaces or accommodations. Let your elected officials know that vaccine passports are a form of institutionalized segregation and must be opposed at all costs. Click now to send a pre-drafted, customizable email and tweet to your congressmen, governor and state legislators.

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OUR STAND: FULL STORY

They’re here.

Governments worldwide are rolling out vaccine passports, certificates showing proof of vaccination for COVID-19. The models differ from country to country (and region to region) but the idea is generally the same — to require the population to obtain paper or digital documents that give them access to certain benefits or privileges. However, there’s a caveat; the benefits and privileges are only extended to those who submit to being vaccinated (a serious form of coercion). Thus, the passports create a two-tiered populace of haves and have-nots — all based on compliance with government directives to use an experimental pharmaceutical product that was approved for use under an emergency use authorization (not the normally required clinical trial safety data testing).[1] Today, that product is the COVID-19 vaccine. Looking ahead, it could easily be any number of pharmaceutical products, especially given that American biopharmaceutical companies have more than 260 vaccines under development.[2]

Vaccine passports are actually being tested right now in the United States. Despite concerns from public health experts that passports would harm communities already affected by COVID, the state of New York recently began a pilot program known as Excelsior.[3] Developed in partnership with IBM, Excelsior was rolled out in late February and uses the same blockchain technology that IBM’s vaccine passport solution, Health Pass, is built on.[4] Excelsior has already been used to screen patrons for admittance into professional-league basketball and hockey games. Compliance is being driven through the promise of getting society back to normal — and fully and safely re-opening the economy.

“As we begin reopening the valves on different sectors of our economy, we are putting guidelines in place to ensure individuals attending events involving larger gatherings have tested negative for COVID or have been vaccinated to avoid an outbreak of the virus,” remarked New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. “The Excelsior Pass will play a critical role in getting information to venues and sites in a secure and streamlined way, allowing us to fast-track the reopening of these businesses and getting us one step closer to reaching a new normal.”

Excelsior is one of nearly 20 vaccine passport initiatives underway in the United States, according to a Washington Post report.[5] The passports, which come in the form of paper cards and smartphone applications, will be used to document proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test for numerous scenarios — engaging in travel, using public transportation, attending school, entering one’s own workplace, and admittance into places of business. Those who choose not to comply and refuse vaccination or testing — be it on philosophical, religious or other grounds — will be prevented from participating in society or receiving basic benefits. Ultimately, this will create a two-tiered, caste-like society in which many are unjustifiably persecuted and discriminated against, with economic impacts that could devastate many more millions of Americans whose livelihoods are already suffering (or gone) from the extended, and now multi-year, lockdowns.

Health passports have no place in a free society. They will quickly usher in institutionalized segregation and a two-tiered society of haves and have-nots — those with privileges and those who are marginalized, second-class citizens presumed to be “dirty and diseased.”

Vaccine Passports: They’re “For Your Safety”

In March of 2020, Americans were told to stay home for two weeks to the flatten the curve.[6] Now, after more than a year of ongoing lockdowns, mandatory masking, social distancing measures and an aggressive COVID-19 vaccine rollout, we’re being told that vaccine passports are the only way to emerge from the pandemic safely.

Such is the case in California, where the Los Angeles Unified School District recently announced the adoption of its Daily Pass app to allow students to return to school.[7] The school district is using the program in partnership with Microsoft and Anthem Healthcare and requires students to use a portal each day that tracks their health symptoms such as body temperature. The app is also being used to schedule and track coronavirus tests and vaccinations within the district.[8]

Vaccine passports are being touted as a new ticket for liberation by government and industry alike. As stated in an IBM press release, “For the last several months, the preeminent puzzle for humanity has been figuring out how to emerge from the pandemic and responsibly return to a new version of business-as-usual. Absent any single quick fix, people around the world have relied on ingenuity and innovation to light a path forward … Now, as governments and health providers manage the ongoing rollout of those life-saving vaccines, the public needs new tools to begin a gradual, confident return to normalcy. One of those promising tools has been developed by IBM, and it is about to get a test run in the United States.”[9]

Passports Violate Federal Laws and Civil Liberties

Despite the positive headlines and corporate talking points that are circulating, vaccine passports are being met with harsh criticism by medical ethicists and others concerned with human rights abuses and violations of privacy rights and informed consent rights. Very simply, the passports violate federal laws that were put in place to specifically protect people against unjust treatment and discrimination, including disability protections.

Moreover, they are illegal. According to federal regulations (45 CFR 46), it’s illegal to force, mandate, coerce or incentivize participation in an ongoing clinical trial.[10] Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still in clinical trial until their estimated completion in 2022 and 2023, respectively.[11]

However, that hasn’t stopped public and private entities from promoting their use or trying to tie various privileges to vaccination. In July 2020, Johns Hopkins issued a report urging local and state public health agencies to explore bundling vaccination with other safety net services such as food security assistance, rent assistance and free clinic services that are already being provided to vulnerable populations.[12]

For at-risk populations or those who are economically disadvantaged, vaccine passports will present the choice of complying with government recommendations — or facing starvation, being homeless or losing access to needed medical services. This is coercive, unethical and an egregious assault on American civil liberties that will ultimately affect every man, woman and child. It will also disproportionately affect ethnic minorities, pregnant women, single mothers, vulnerable populations like the disabled, and those who don’t want to disclose their private information, including their medical status.

Jim Crow, Apartheid and Nazism Rolled Into One

The use of vaccine passports comes at a great cost to a free country.[13] They erode personal choice, health freedom, privacy rights, basic constitutional rights and our democracy — while ushering in a totalitarian regime reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, Apartheid and Nazism. Experts say that instead of creating hope, passports will quickly create a dystopian and highly coercive society through a new form of medical racism and segregation that’s designed to weed out and separate those deemed inferior or undesirable.

In a recent media interview, former Clinton policy adviser Naomi Wolf warned that vaccine passports would be the “end of human liberty in the West” if they unfold as planned.[14]

“It is absolutely so much more than a vaccine pass,” said Wolf, the author of The End of America, a 2007 book that sounds the alarm against rising government abuses of power. “I can not stress enough that it has the power to turn off your life, or to turn on your life, to let you engage in society or be marginalized.”[15]

“Nazis created exactly what ‘Vaccine Passports’ explicitly promise: separation of society into two tiers: the ‘clean’ (privileged, with access) and ‘unclean’ (restricted, stigmatized, marginalized). There is no going back once this platform unrolls; no escape,” Wolf wrote in a March 28 tweet.[16]

Holocaust survivor and human rights champion Vera Sharav concurs: vaccine passports are steeped in Nazism and antithetical to a democratic society. “If you regard some human beings as more valuable than others, then you’re opening up the Holocaust,” remarked Sharav, the founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, in an interview with Stand for Health Freedom. “It’s very simple. That’s eugenics in a nutshell.”

Above: Shots of Excelsior Pass, the vaccine passport developed in partnership with IBM that’s now being used in New York.

Passports Raise Significant Privacy Issues

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties in the rise of digital products, “Immunity passports would threaten our privacy and information security,” and they would be “a significant step toward a system of national digital identification that can be used to collect and store our personal information and track our location.”[17]

New surveillance infrastructures, no matter how “secure,” always create new opportunities for major data breaches and misuse of information, especially national or international programs like Health Pass that house individuals’ most personal information all under one umbrella. According to the ACLU, which has publicly stated that it’s firmly against vaccine passports because of their vast potential for harm, it’s altogether different for an employee to voluntarily disclose his or her COVID-19 status to an employer on a one-off basis than it is to collect and retain information.[18] Other privacy concerns exist around the possibility of additional contract tracing measures as well as the potential by authorities to invade homes and seize individuals and family members.

Forced Vaccination is Unethical, Illegal and Coercive

Despite continuous positive mainstream news coverage of pharmaceutical industry giants (the pharmaceutical industry is the primary funder of the media) and billion-dollar government campaigns designed to convince people that COVID-19 vaccines are completely safe, effective and the ticket to freedom, there are numerous issues with coercing or forcing an experimental medical product on the population.

Most notably, vaccine manufacturers cannot ensure the safety of any COVID vaccine; the products have had months of clinical observation,[19] not the many years that are required to prove safety and efficacy through post-marketing surveillance. First-generation pharmaceutical products are also notorious for unintended side effects.[20] Examples include birth defects caused by the drug thalidomide and antibody dependent enhancement seen with the dengue vaccine.[21] Antibody dependent enhancement is a phenomenon where subjects who receive a vaccine for a virus become significantly more ill when they’re exposed to that virus in the wild.[22] (In other words, rather than the vaccine offering protection, it actually causes them to experience severe illness or die.)

Under current U.S. Supreme Court law, in order to mandate a medical intervention there must be an epidemic that imperils the entire population.[23] According to the CDC’s own data, most people have more than a 97 percent chance of surviving COVID-19 without the vaccine. In fact, for people under the age of 70, the survivability rate ranges from 99.5 percent to 99.99 percent. [24]

Considering these factors, vaccine passports are clearly not medically justifiable and are based entirely on coercion.[25]

Requiring individuals to use a pharmaceutical product —regardless of how healthy they are or their risk factor for COVID-19 — is unethical and coercive.
Requiring individuals to use a pharmaceutical product to receive certain privileges or basic necessities is also a form of coercion and, thus, is unethical.
Requiring individuals to use an experimental, fast-tracked vaccine with 1) known safety concerns 2) no long-term safety and efficacy studies available and 3) no recourse for injury or death is unethical and illegal.

Furthermore, the fact that passport programs are being utilized for a vaccine that has not been proven to stop infection or transmission[26] — and a test that’s merely meant to be a diagnostic aid, not definitive proof of COVID[27] — demonstrates the passports are completely unwarranted and not grounded in science. Critics of the programs say they have everything to do with generating profits, compliance and control — and creating data points for incessant surveillance of the population— not improving health and safety.

Vaccine Passports Are Not Inevitable

Over the past year, public health authorities and the media have incited mass fear in the population through round-the-clock media coverage of COVID-19 cases and death reports and the use of dashboards that display daily COVID metrics.[28] Fear has been utilized as an ongoing motivator for measures like masking, social distancing and getting vaccinated. Yet despite more than a year of draconian public health measures, to which the public has largely complied, officials continue to paint a grim picture, indicating these policies have not been working.[29] [30] At a press briefing in late March, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky issued warnings of “impending doom” and urged Americans to follow public mandates and to “hold on a little longer” until they can get vaccinated against the coronavirus.[31]

“We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are, and so much reason for hope,” said Walensky. “But right now I’m scared.”[32]

By inciting more fear and painting a picture of impending doom, public officials are trying to firmly cement the notion that vaccine passports are indeed the only path forward. But are they actually inevitable?

“Now, the idea of inevitability is a powerful tool,” writes Kit Knightly in the Off-Guardian. “You can encourage it as a way of preparing the ground for a policy roll out, sure, but you can also use it to engender feelings of defeat in your opposition and thus gain their consent without force.”

Knightly’s message to his readers is important to heed: “Vaccine passports will only ever become ‘inevitable’ once the vast majority of people have had the vaccine. If enough people refuse to take part, the program will never work.”[33]

Will You Stand Your Ground or Cave to Peer Pressure and Intimidation Tactics?

As the financial stakes get higher and public pressure mounts for individuals to get the COVID-19 vaccine,[34] [35] what will you do when you are asked to show proof that you have received the vaccine? What if you have privacy concerns or concerns with the product? What if getting the COVID-19 vaccine violates your religious convictions or goes against your morals or better judgment? What if you’re at risk of an adverse reaction? What if your child needs proof of vaccination to attend school, but weekly COVID tests aren’t feasible or agreeable? What if you’re healthy but might be dismissed from employment, travel and community events? Or what if you just feel like saying no?

From Georgia to Texas to Kansas, various governors across the nation have stated they don’t intend to force the experimental COVID-19 vaccine.[36] [37] But are they willing to protect their constituents from immense coercion? Even though some passports like Health Pass make a negative PCR test a viable option, there are major concerns —economic and otherwise — with indefinite, ongoing testing. Additionally, even if restrictions don’t come from the government first, they could easily come from businesses and private venues who take matters into their own hands and start requiring proof of vaccination or testing even though there is no federal or state mandate.[38]

With so much at stake, it’s imperative that we abide by our convictions and stand our moral ground.

Say No to Passports and Tell Your Lawmakers To Say No, Too

No pharmaceutical product should ever be forced, especially a fast-tracked, experimental vaccine that’s free from liability for any harm it might cause.[39] Vaccine passports give pharma the final say over if and how we as individuals get to participate in society. This is contrary to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.[40]

Pharma is fallible, the governing agencies that oversee pharma are fallible, and the public-private partnerships that stand to make billions do not get the final say in shaping our individual lives and our culture at the expense of our health freedom and our democracy.

There’s no time to spare! Each and every American must stand up against vaccine passports now! Click now to make it abundantly clear to your elected officials that medical coercion has no place in a free society. Personal choice, not public pressure and intimidation tactics, must be the only factor in getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Moreover, we cannot let lawmakers or private businesses usher in a totalitarian society that promotes medical racism, apartheid and eugenics — and where people are forced to show their papers to move about and participate in society and live an everyday life.

Send a pre-drafted, customizable email and tweet to your state and federal officials urging them to stand up against coercion and ban vaccine passports. Afterward, please be sure to share this important campaign with your friends, relatives and neighbors.