Vaccine passports are the kind of ID the Biden administration likes
IDs for voting, no.
IDs for having been vaccinated, yes.
It’s one thing to have proof of vaccination. It’s quite another to require it in order to travel or be allowed access to other activities:
“Considering that Democrats want to require vaccine IDs for people to conduct their basic daily activities, they now have zero grounds to object to voter ID laws,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., told Fox News. “If under Democrat logic, you should need an ID to enter even a grocery store, surely there wouldn’t be an objection to showing an ID to legally vote.”
House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, slammed the Biden administration for pursuing the idea of vaccine passports when the president “doesn’t seem to care about passports when it comes to illegal migrants crossing the southern border.”
Scalise is being sarcastic there; he knows the objections the left would mount against voter IDs versus vaccine passports. The left defines the first as the racist Republicans disenfranchising people of color, and many courts have agreed with the left. The left defines the second as the kind and caring Democrats protecting us all from a dread disease. One can play the sophistry game almost indefinitely, and charges of hypocrisy change few if any minds.
More:
Freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., strongly condemned the idea of vaccine passports.
“Proposals like these smack of 1940s Nazi Germany. We must make every effort to keep America from becoming a ‘show your papers society,’” Cawthorn told Fox News. “The Constitution and our founding principles decry this type of totalitarianism.”
“America faces a dangerous future when its leader’s ideology shares more commonalities with Leninism than liberalism,” the North Carolina Republican added.
That’s where we are, however. And COVID has been the perfect opportunity for the left to test the waters of totalitarianism further and further, and to find that many Americans are very willing to wade right in.
[NOTE: This post ties in with this earlier post from today. Seems to be a theme. In fact, it’s probably the most basic theme we confront in the BHO administration.]
Naomi Wolf (definitely not a conservative of any variety) has appeared at least twice on Tucker’s show in order to sound a warning about the dangers of the technocratic attempt at ever greater control of the populace. She argues that this “mandatory vaccine passport” could easily spell the end of liberty in the West. It seems obvious that one of the reasons (other than the purely financial) for the unwillingness of many, if not most, “progressives” to criticize China or the CCP is that these leftists long for one-party (mis)rule and the ability to monitor almost all aspects of the lives of citizens, who will have been reduced to a kind of serfdom.
There is a poli-sci professor at the low-rated University of Nebraska – Lincoln that I follow on Twitter. His name is Ari Kohen and he’s Jewish. He thinks these proposed vaccine passports are a joke.
I, the Catholic guy educated at the highly-rated Creighton University, informed him that the Nazis bought computing machines from IBM to keep track on the Jews so that they could round them up and then kill them in an efficient manner.
What’s really going on here is that the Dems want to enact something like the social credit score that the CCP uses in China.
Me – being who I am – would have a NEGATIVE social credit score. I’d be sent to the re-education camp at Rulo, Nebraska. (Rulo is an inside Nebraska joke.)
Some of the more entrepreneurial sorts will certainly find them lots of fun to forge.
(They’ve already started….)
What problem does the vaccine passport solve? If you are vaccinated, you shouldn’t care whether others are or not. You are vaccinated, and if the vaccine works, then you are not at risk of contracting the disease from someone else. If the vaccine doesn’t work well, then a vaccine passport won’t solve this problem either. It will simply offer a false positive, just like the original vaccination.
Even on face value, this seems like it is just a punishment to those that either choose not to get vaccinated, or worse, wasn’t yet able to get such a vaccination.
Funny that this is one area were Democrats are willing to hold people personally accountable for their own behaviors. Maybe we should point out that current restrictions on obtaining a vaccination is based on various privileges given to certain occupations (such as cops), age groups (such as boomers), and those who have other morbidities (such as eating too much). If you aren’t privileged, you neither can get the vaccine, and if Biden gets his way, you can’t use public transportation either.
I may be accused of being cynical but with BioNTech at 15B, Moderna at 18.4B, and the biggest recipient Pfizer, who knows? Pretty soon the the available vaccines are going to outnumber the demand. They are very expensive to store and the best way to make sure there is a market is to make it mandatory. The first step will be just applying the incentive; in order to travel, go to entertainment venues etc. Here in California, early last year, Governor Newsom contracted for 1B for masks from China. Is there any wonder why we’ve been forced to wear them?
@Sharon W:
Is CalPERS still hard at it ‘investing’ real (well kind of) taxpayer money into dodgy overvalued Chinese shares?
I’m repeatedly stunned by the lack of people who completely miss what is going on here. Really? You people out there think it’s normal for a commercial business to demand evidence of your vaccination? Okay, so let’s play it out. Every smart phone with the passport technology on it. It starts with COVID. And then an exec at Roundy’s says, “hey, you know, it would be great to know if people have also had their flu vaccines so we know it won’t be spread in our stores.” And they press for added functionality and the next thing you know your flu vaccine becomes a part of it. And then some jackass at Home Depot says, “you know, we have a lot of rusty nails and dirty splintered wood and stuff laying around, how about we make sure all our customers’ tetanus shots are up to date?” and voila! More functionality.
Before you know it we are walking around with our medical records on our phones and businesses are demanding to see our medical history before we are allowed to enter. Why wouldn’t they do that, you ask? Hell, some would do it just to see if they could make you comply. And then it’s the social score that gets added. Anyway, you get the point. And this tells the story nicely of when it has happened before. https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
I think that Europe has done something like this for ages. It’s been a while, but you had to show a passport just to check into a hotel.
Certainly as a foreigner I’ve had to show my passport in hotels in Europe, Africa, Asia Minor and India. But that’s not the same thing.
Burton M has it right. And anyone who thinks they wouldn’t use the data to check on where we go is terribly naive.
You have a smart phone or you have used FaceBook or your grandchildren have tagged your pics in their FaceBook accounts –> too late. Plus of course all your web browsing activity has been tracked and logged and can be and is worked over by data mining and machine learning at will.
Increasingly your DNA is on file. Your facial biometrics certainly are… and increasingly your gait will be matched with facial biometrics so that obscuring your face won’t work so well either.
This cannot and will not be walked back from. By Other Means — and only if enough of us are willing to give up a lot of our conveniences. Can’t see that happening.
Zaphod:
Yes, they now have tools far more sophisticated than anything Orwell ever dreamt.
Zaphod and Paul, you are both conflating different things with the idea of “vaccine passports”. They are passports in name only. The US has something called HIPAA that is specifically written to provide all sorts of privacy protections to your medical records. So now we are supposed to believe that it is reasonable for any private business to request an element of those records for me to access their premises? No, this is not okay. And once I am comfortable with that information being out there, why not my entire vaccination record? Yes, children attending schools need to show vaccination records. But there are also medical and religious exceptions provided to these requirements. And these records often have as much to do with insurance coverage as with anything. I have given my medical history to BSA in order to participate in a high stress backpacking trip and to SCUBA dive, etc. This has to do with the high risk nature of these activities. But to shop for groceries? I’m sorry but this is just not normal. And we are being gaslit into thinking it’s okay.
@Burton:
Lobbyists designed HIPAA to make it impossible for small players to compete in the medical data field — this by putting in huge burdens of certification and oversight in order to avoid swingeing fines and serious criminal sanctions.
You may wish to think that it exists to preserve your ‘rights’ and ‘privacy’ if you so desire.
Also, with big data and machine learning and pervasive surveillance it is not necessary to even access your supposedly secure HIPAA data in order to deduce a lot of knowledge about your health status.
If we have learned anything in this past year it should be that ‘exigencies’ (*) will be used to justify anything. So past performance is no guarantee of future results, methinks.
(*) I wake up some mornings and get out of bed the wrong side and find myself hankering after an Enabling Act 😛
Zaphod, while there may be truth in the protective nature of the medical data field, it does not change the fact that medical data privacy is a key feature of the legislation and, again, the normalization of a medical passport (vaccine or otherwise) is only a small step away from social credit scoring. You can ignore what has been and is being done to erode our privacy rights (a right, I might add, the entire Roe and Griswold cases in the Supreme Court rely upon), but do so at your own peril. Reposting the link I posted earlier to emphasize the point.https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
I’m actually a little surprised that an enterprising Conservative hasn’t ambushed a Progressive in a TV talking heads segment with this yet. It would be fun to watch:
Progressive: “What we need are COVID vaccination passports, used to ensure that everyone is kept safe, that our safe distancing and other measures are being maintained in the best way possible to ensure all public places are kept to the highest standard”
Conservative: “What a great idea, and I have a way to really make it work. We’ll add the COVID vaccination information to the Voter ID registration cards. Or better yet, to Driver’s Licenses, with pictures. That way, both identity and vaccination are certified on the spot. After all, polling places can get crowded, amirite? Whaddaya think?”
@Burton:
I think we are on the same side in what we wish for. I just happen to think that the genie is not going back in the bottle and that ‘Medical Privacy’ is likely to end up a weapon used by the Elites to belabor us when it suits them and the ‘Protections’ will only apply when it suits them or they don’t matter.
@Aggie:
But you see, the only kind of Conservative Ambusher who would stoop to that kind of smart rhetorical jujitsu would also have a Kiddie Porn habit. Well he certainly would have one uploaded for him by the next day.
Sharon W,
Right you are my dear, follow the money.
Also, not sure how this works with the ‘experts’ telling us the vaccine may only be good for about 6 months and no good at all for the ‘variants’. Imagine having to get your semi annual booster to keep the ‘passport’ valid.
They keep getting tangled up in their own lies and it’s becoming more obvious by the day – even to the ‘normies’.
Good point, Molly Brown. I have laminated my CDC COVID vaccination card so I can show it if I decide to fly to a country requiring it. But what good is it, if the vaccine needs to be repeated?
Also, it looks like Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins may be right, and the country may be approached herd immunity. With infection rates and death rates way, way down, this is looking more like theater than medicine or public health.
Also, not sure how this works with the ‘experts’ telling us the vaccine may only be good for about 6 months and no good at all for the ‘variants’.
I think it was supposed to be of limited effectiveness contra the South African variant, not the British variant. Case counts and death counts have collapsed in Britain and in South Africa, so something is effective contra the variants.
OBVIOUS solution.
Require ID to get the vax.
Require proof of vax to vote.
Bing bada bang.
Problem solv-ed!!
😀
Aggie wrote, “I’m actually a little surprised that an enterprising Conservative hasn’t ambushed a Progressive in a TV talking heads segment with this yet. It would be fun to watch”
Yes, but I don’t think it persuades nearly as well as this:
Molly+Brown wrote, “They keep getting tangled up in their own lies and it’s becoming more obvious by the day – even to the ‘normies’.”
I believe Molly Ivins said something about the people’s tolerance for politicians occasionally stepping vs. constantly stomping on something.
The Mark of the Beast?
Ah ha. This, from Andrea Widburg sounds like the precisely accurate analysis to me.
I have a friend who faithfully regurgitates every bit of drivel that The New Yorker mag. publishes. Some months ago he made the argument that censorship was fine as long as a private company or corporation does it. It’s the American way isn’t it, he sneeringly said. I argued, that #1, Twitter and Facebook have an illegal monopoly position in their spaces, and #2, they operate under a legal immunity arrangement that forbids editorial control. They should be shut down until they honor the law.
And what’s next after vaccine IDs have been burned into the conscious of the citizenry?
How about IDs to identify potential “enemies of the state.” People thus identified would be forced to wear, say, an arm band with a picture of Trump on it. This form of ID would then be used, legally, to prevent that individual from walking through certain parts of town, from driving, from shopping / living outside approved areas, etc.
But to give them a break, they will be allowed to live, work, etc., in special areas only; let’s call them Ghettos.
And all those shop owners that voted the “wrong” way, would be forced to paste onto their shop windows a big photo of Trump.
This way, during a govt. sponsored Trumpel-nacht, only the “approved” businesses would be targeted for destruction.
Of course, once the enemies of the state are herded into approved Ghettos, the Trumpel-nachts would no longer be necessary.
Recall that folks like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Himmler, et. al., never killed anybody. They were able to find many many thousands of people that would just follow orders and do the dirty work.
Like a frog slowly boiled to death, the citizenry is being conditioned to obey, unconditionally, government mandates regardless of their legality.
For me, the solution for stores requiring the ID is to shop online, although, I do agree with those who have said, companies are doing the bidding for the government tyrants (ok, so I said tyrants).
I am pro vaccine, yet I simply don’t understand why we are forcing vaccines for a virus whose survival rate is over 99% for 99% of the public?! So now we are ordering the management of society over less than 1% of the populace?! The vaccine probably will negatively effect people on a higher % than the virus itself!
With infection rates and death rates way, way down, this is looking more like theater than medicine or public health.
It’s been largely theater all along. If we’d just put a fraction of the resources we’ve wasted shutting down businesses and schools into focused protection of the elderly and others with co-morbidities, we’d have had fewer deaths and a healthier (in every sense of the word) society. This is not 20-20 hindsight, as it’s been understood since at least April 2020.
Instead we were lied to that “everyone is at risk!!!” We saw this before with AIDS, when people like Fauci claimed it would spread like wildfire to heterosexuals. In fact hardly any heteros in this country got AIDS except via blood transfusions. But any suggestion that gay sexual promiscuity was mainly responsible for the spread of AIDS was homophobic or something.
Proof of vaccination needed to travel, etc.?
I wonder if this will end up like so many college students who use/create a cottage industry to get fake IDs so they can drink in bars even though they are not 21 yet.
Or will it be like Obamacare mandated healthcare “insurance” which caused a lot of insurance companies to offer “lost cost” heath insurance which basically had no benefits. But, some folks signed up because it was cheaper than paying the Obamacare tax.