(Article by Dr. Joseph Mercola republished from Articles.Mercola.com)
In “The Jimmy Dore Show” above, Dore highlights and interviews Max Blumenthal about his article, “Public Health or Private Wealth? How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way for Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism,”1 co-written with investigative reporter Jeremy Loffredo.
The article reviews some of the tragic consequences that can be expected if a global rollout of digital vaccine passports were to succeed. Loffredo and Blumenthal point to India, where a digital ID system has already been implemented.
The database, called Aadhaar, contains the digital identifications of more than 1 billion residents, making it the largest biometric digital ID system ever constructed.
India’s System Illustrates the Dangers of Digital IDs
While not officially described as such, the system is a “de facto social credit system,” the authors say. It’s sold to the public as the key access point to government services, but it also tracks users’ geolocation, employment and purchasing habits.
Indians have no choice but to submit to this invasive surveillance in order to access government services and assistance programs, such as food rations. As you might expect from such a behemoth database, there are glitches, and in India, such glitches have proven deadly. Loffredo and Blumenthal explain:2
“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.”
Rule Through Medicine
As noted by the authors, “titans of global capitalism” are now exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic to implement this kind of social-credit style digital ID systems across the Western world:
“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.”
The plan is as diabolical as it is genius. While the rise of dictatorships has historically involved the use of armed forces to subdue an unruly public, the budding dictatorship of today relies heavily on weaponized medicine and the control of information.
If you’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with the concept of technocracy, which has a distinct transhumanist component to it, you will see why this makes perfect sense and was, in fact, entirely predictable. By tying the issue of health care into the digital surveillance apparatus, you end up with a very robust platform for automated mass control.
The use of fear also works well in this scenario, since most are keen to stay alive and don’t want their loved ones to die. So, they fall for lies like “we have to shut down the world and sequester indoors for months on end or else we all die.”
Bill Gates Turns Public Health to Private Wealth
A leading figure in this medical dictatorship scheme is Bill Gates, who now wields a dominating influence over not just Big Tech but also global health policy, agriculture and food policy (including biopiracy and fake food), weather modification and other climate technologies,3 surveillance, education and media. As reported by Loffredo and Michele Greenstein in a July 8, 2020, GrayZone article:4
“Beyond the public relations bonanza about Gates lies a disturbing history that should raise concerns about whether his foundation’s plans for resolving the pandemic will benefit the global public as much as it expands and entrenches its power over international institutions.
The Gates Foundation has already effectively privatized the international body charged with creating health policy, transforming it into a vehicle for corporate dominance.
It has facilitated the dumping of toxic products onto the people of the Global South, and even used the world’s poor as guinea pigs for drug experiments. The Gates Foundation’s influence over public health policy is practically contingent on ensuring that safety regulations and other government functions are weak enough to be circumvented …
Strong evidence suggests that the Gates Foundation functions as a Trojan horse for Western corporations, which of course have no goal greater than an increased bottom line.”
Indeed, Gates donates billions to private companies, and is heavily invested in the very products and businesses he donates money to and otherwise promotes as solutions to the world’s problems, be they hunger, disease, pandemic viruses or climate change.
As suggested by The GrayZone, Gates’ global health empire is more about building an empire for himself and his technocrat cronies than promoting public health.5 Not surprisingly, Gates has called Aadhaar’s creator “a hero,” and many of Gates’ initiatives have sought to bring a similar system to the West.6
It’s About Control and Profit
As explained by Blumenthal in the video, these biometric ID systems are all about allowing private companies to profit from your personal data. They’ve been doing that for years already, of course, siphoning your personal data online and then selling it to anyone willing to pay, be they crooks and scammers or reputable companies.
But a biometric ID system will allow them to sell and profit from your fingerprints, iris and your face, along with all the data that is tied to you, from medical and employment data to social and financial services.
So, to summarize, the vaccine passport/digital ID system will allow those controlling the system to profit from your very identity while simultaneously enslaving you to the system. It’s a modernized slave system, pure and simple.
The Convenience Trap
For a taste of what vaccine passports will turn into, check out the video above by the military surveillance firm Thales, which has acknowledged that vaccine passports are in fact the precursor to digital ID wallets.7 As you can see, the digital ID is being sold as a phenomenal convenience, something that will protect you, your identity and your money.
Believe this PR stunt at your own risk. As noted by Dore, “If I [the digital wallet] falls into the wrong hands, [your] life is pretty much over.” The most disturbing part is that having it fall into the hands of hackers and thieves isn’t your biggest concern.
Considering the devastating power a totalitarian regime can have over your life through their control of this system — should they disapprove of what you say, what you view, what you buy, where you go, how you behave or who you hang out with — losing your digital wallet to a common crook would be a minor inconvenience in comparison.
As noted by Dore, the dictators in charge could declare you a terrorist for participating in a protest, and shut off your access to government services, health care services and bank accounts with a single push of a button. Nothing you want to do in life will be very convenient after that.
There’s also the possibility of glitches and system errors, of course, and as illustrated in the Indian stories above, that too can have lethal consequences. A fingerprint failed to register. Pension payments were transferred to the wrong person and food rations were inexplicably cut off.
How is it that errors cannot be fixed? Probably because all the authorities who rely on the system have no authority to make changes in it. It’s all automated, run by algorithms, and everyone is essentially a powerless slave to and within the system. Probably, everyone just shrugged, saying they couldn’t do anything about it, and the lack of human involvement led to the death of these people.
And problems are not rare. A random sampling of 18 villages in India that had implemented compulsory biometric authentication at rationing stations showed a shocking 37% of people were unable to get their food rations due to some problem in the system.8
How Many Times Are You Willing to Play Russian Roulette?
When it comes to vaccine passports, we’ve already seen that maintaining a valid passport will require you to get an undisclosed number of booster shots. It’s not like you can just get the initial one- or two-dose regimen and be set.
No, any time a booster is released, your passport will cease to be valid until or unless you get that booster, be it the third or the thirty-third. Considering how dangerous these COVID shots are turning out to be, you’ll essentially be gambling your life each and every time you get the injection. And for what?
You’ll do it to be “given” basic freedoms that you never even thought could be infringed upon a mere two years ago, such as the right to work, the right to go to school, the right to travel and move about in society as you please, to shop, enter a gym or restaurant or a bank.
Say NO to Biomedical Dictatorship
In Italy, where mandatory vaccine passports are now implanted for all workers, both public and private, reports of inhumane exclusion are already emerging. An old woman was turned away from a hospital because she didn’t have a passport.9
Lithuanians have some of the harshest COVID shot mandates in the world. There, the unvaccinated are banned from restaurants, all non-essential stores, shopping malls, beauty services, libraries, banks, insurance agencies, universities, inpatient medical care and train travel. In a series of Twitter posts, Gluboco Lietuva, an unvaccinated father and husband, said:10
“With no COVID Pass, my wife and I are banished from society. We have no income. Banned from most shopping. Can barely exist ... We tried to buy art supplies for our kids from a craft store. No purchase allowed without a Pass. We tried to buy educational toys in a toy store. We were barred from entering. Can't buy kitchen supplies. Banal, but frustrating ...
This pressure to submit is everywhere. And it's overwhelming. Our ability to survive has been destroyed. But no matter the suffering imposed and the hardships we must endure, we will never accept the descent into the authoritarianism which the COVID Pass represents.”
Indeed, while standing up to the tyranny that is the vaccine passport now might cause pain and struggle, it’s nothing to the pain we’ll experience down the line if we don’t say no now.
Just how much freedom are you willing to lose? Don’t think for a minute that it’ll all end once you get fully vaccinated against COVID-19. As noted by the financial consulting firm Aite-Novarica in September 2021,11 the COVID-19 digital vaccine passport rolled out in New York (the Excelsior Pass) is “a step toward comprehensive digital identification ... beyond COVID-19 vaccination only,” and serves as a “neat pilot program opportunity” to that end.
Military-Intelligence Org at Center of US Vaccine Pass Push
In the interview, Blumenthal mentions he’ll soon publish another article detailing the military-intelligence organization MITRE’s role in the U.S. vaccine passport push. That article was published on The GrayZone October 26, 2021.12 If you’ve been a fence-sitter, this piece just might push you to make a decision as to where you stand on this issue.
While MITRE is listed as a nonprofit, its leadership consists of military intelligence professionals, and most of its business comes from contracts with the Department of Defense, FBI and national security sector.
“The effort ‘to expand QR code vaccine passports beyond states like California and New York’ now revolves around a public-private partnership known as the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI). And the VCI has reserved an instrumental role in its coalition for MITRE,” Blumenthal and Loffredo write.13
“Described by Forbes as a ‘cloak and dagger [research and development] shop’ that is ‘the most important organization you’ve never heard of,’ MITRE has developed some of the most invasive surveillance technology in use by U.S. spy agencies today.
Among its most novel products is a system built for the FBI which captures individuals’ fingerprints from images posted on social media sites. MITRE’s own COVID-19 umbrella coalition includes In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Palantir, a scandal-stained private spying firm.
Elizabeth Renieris, the founding director of Notre Dame and IBM’s technology ethics lab, has warned that ‘as dominant technology and surveillance companies’ like MITRE ‘pursue new revenue streams in healthcare and financial services ... privately owned and operated ID systems with profit-maximizing business models threaten the privacy, security, and other fundamental rights of individuals and communities.’
Indeed, the involvement of the military-intelligence apparatus in the development of a digital vaccine passport system is yet another indication that behind the guise of public health concerns, the U.S. surveillance state could be due to enhance its control over an increasingly restive population.”
What Is MITRE?
So, what is MITRE, and why are they a key player in the VCI? The organization did not reply to “The GrayZone’s” questions for the article; “however, its documented history makes for unsettling reading,” Blumenthal and Loffredo note.
MITRE was founded in 1958 and is based in northern Virginia. The military-intelligence think tank receives about $2 billion a year from U.S. agencies. Initially, it was founded as a joint project of the U.S. Air Force and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to develop command and control systems for nuclear and conventional warfare.
They’ve also been contracted to eradicate cannabis in Mexico using toxic herbicides, a strategy that ended up contaminating large swaths of food crops. More recently, MITRE has worked on surveillance tech for the FBI, collecting fingerprints from people’s social media photos where their palms and fingers are visible, and helped the agency establish the world’s largest biometric database.
MITRE also worked on the FBI’s Modernized Intelligence Database (MIDB) project, which according to the former FBI assistant director William Bayse allowed police to identify the political causes, associates and employers of activists, along with their biometric data, spending and tax information. As if that’s not hair raising enough, Blumenthal and Loffredo note:14
“Through hundreds of FOIA requests and interviews with current and former MITRE officials, Forbes learned that MITRE has designed ‘a prototype tool that can hack into smartwatches, fitness trackers and home thermometers for the purposes of homeland security… and a study to determine whether someone’s body odor can show they’re lying.’
MITRE is also home to the ATT&CK Program, an cybersecurity module which the corporation describes as ‘a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and [intelligence] techniques based on real-world observations.’
Adam Pennington, the lead architect for MITRE’s ATT&CK, ‘has spent over a decade with MITRE studying and preaching the use of deception for intelligence gathering.’ ACLU staff attorney Nate Wessler has called MITRE’s surveillance projects ‘extraordinarily chilling,’ and warned that they ‘raise serious privacy concerns.’”
These are the same people who are now playing a key role in the U.S. vaccine passport program. Blumenthal and Loffredo go into further depth in their article,15 but I think you get the gist.
The vaccine passports clearly have nothing to do with keeping people healthy and safe from infection, and everything to do with turning our most personal data into a profit center that simultaneously allows them to exercise unprecedented control over everyone’s life.
Make no mistake, sooner or later — and time is rapidly running out — everyone will have to make a choice: freedom or slavery. There’s no middle ground anymore.
And if we say no to slavery, we must be ready to not capitulate, because we can already see that mass protests are doing little to dissuade the World Economic Forum and its partners from pushing for a global digital vaccine ID, along with a centralized digital currency. Together, those two things will give them complete control over our lives. Our children and grandchildren will never experience what it’s like to be free if we let that happen.
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