The Time to Resist Vax Passports Is Now – The American Conservative

Now that vaccines turn out to be better at protecting yourself than protecting others, the rationale for making them mandatory is dissolving. And yet this is the exact moment when cities across the country are launching their own vaccine passports.

The cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., all have vaccine passport systems coming into effect this month, covering restaurants, gyms, entertainment venues, and other indoor locations. Los Angeles launched SafePassLA in November, following the lead of San Francisco and New York City, which launched their vaccine passports last fall.

The mayors of these cities don t even pretend to have a good rationale for launching vaccine passports now. Reading their public remarks, the reasoning seems to be that the more they harass the unvaccinated, the higher their city s vax rate will go. Invocations of protecting others are rote, with no explicit suggestion that vaccinated individuals don t spread the new, highly contagious Omicron variant.

Coercing people into a medical procedure that they don t want and, depending on their risk profile, don t need, is evil. But that s not the most important reason to oppose vaccine passports. The most important reason is that once you create the infrastructure for a social credit system, you will never get rid of it.

Once Americans get accustomed to scanning a QR code every time they enter a building, there is no limit to the surveillance and nudges that can be built on top of it.

There would be a record of where you went and who you were with any time you went out to a bar. Right now you have to show ID to drink, which some people think is equivalent to showing proof of vaccination. But the police can t call up the bar and ask for a list of everyone who was on the premises last night. Under a vaccine passport regime, providing such a list would be as easy as pointing and clicking. Australian police have already used data from QR code check-ins in criminal investigations. This suggests they get some level of surveillance out of it beyond what they had before, even with cell phone location tracking and other digital footprints.

via www.theamericanconservative.com

I’d say it’s a mystery to me how one can oppose showing your ID to vote and yet requiring everyone to carry around what amounts to an electronic ID device and basis for an eventual social credit system. This way the government can know all sorts of personal information about you but when you vote, it has to just close its eyes and believe you are a citizen on faith. Of course the explanation is that the Dems need votes by those unqualified to vote, as well as thinking they can use the rest of your personal information for various social control purposes. I hope this no good, very bad idea can be limited to a few big cities, but I’m not sure it will be.