Florida, Texas, Montana Against COVID Coercion

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo meets with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in Miami, Florida on January 23, 2020. [State Department Photo by Ron Przysucha/ Public Domain]

Will you need a COVID vaccine passport to return to work or travel, to attend a sports event or a family wedding? More and more blue state politicians seem to be all for these passports.

Christopher Bedford in The Federalist wonders, will Republican governors have the courage to break with political, corporate, global elites?

Will they have the will to tell government agencies and private businesses they have no right to demand the citizens of their states subject themselves to an experimental vaccine?

IBM first launched a COVID passport on Oct. 12, just weeks after the National Institute of Health awarded them a contract to develop “an integrated solution that supports sophisticated contact tracing and verifiable health status reporting.” IBM’s tech-chic website tells visitors their product is “Designed to provide organizations with a smart way to bring people back to a physical location during COVID-19.”

From IBM’s Video Promoting Its Digital Health Pass:

Airlines, cruise lines, railways, and hotels all feel pressure to meet ever-changing health regulations and rebuild travelers’ trust. Now, COVID-19 taskforces globally are asking, ‘What can we do to return to pre-pandemic capacity? How can we verify a traveler’s health status before they [sic] visit?’ … Introducing IBM Digital Health Pass.

• Germany signed with IBM on 10 March to bring IBM passports to the Federal Republic of Germany.
• New York, working with IBM, became the first to launch a state vaccine passport on 26 March. “Excelsior Pass,” the press release reads, “can be used by participating New Yorkers at theaters, major stadiums and arenas, weddings receptions, catered events, and other events in accordance with New York State guidelines.”
• South Korea in early April partnered with a Korean company to do the same.
• Emirates, the state airline of the United Arab Emirates, partnered with the United States’ GE to develop an immunity passport, while the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) is working with
• Air France, Italy’s Alitalia, the UAE’s Etihad Airways, and others are working with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) to implement a passport built by a start-up called Perlin.
• Mastercard and the ICC are partnering to see if they can make their passports work together.
• Salesforce, Walmart, Cerner, Oracle, Microsoft, Epic Systems, Mayo Clinic, and the Mitre Corporation are working on a global ID of their own.
• Israel has a passport already.
• The European Union is two months away from its own.
• Iowa, Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee, Nebraska, Mississippi, Missouri, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and South Dakota governors have said they would not issue or require vaccine passports. However, “they’ve stopped short of protecting citizens from being coerced by private businesses that refuse to deal with them unless they furnish proof of vaccination.”
• Texas went a step further, banning private businesses that accept government money from requiring passports.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte are the only two in the country to prohibit businesses from requiring customers to provide proof of vaccination in order to conduct business.

Will governors draw a line protect their citizens from medical coercion in order to conduct business, asks Mr. Bedford.

Government-corporate databases are both a dream for hackers and a quick path to a social credit system, and the only way to retard that kind of power is to make medical mandates a terrible burden to the states and businesses that demand them. The way to do this is a patchwork of states that resist by banning them. Do corporations want to do business in states like Texas, Florida, and Montana? Do airlines want to maintain hubs in states that say no? Are companies willing to write off that much market share?

From J.D. Vance (“Hillbilly Elegy”), a possible 2022 Ohio senator candidate:

I don’t care if Google is a private company because it has too much power. And if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely you have to be concerned about power, whether it’s concentrated in the government or concentrated in big corporations.

“Vance is right,” continues Mr. Bedford.

… the past year has revealed that a depressing number of Americans will yield to arbitrary power wielded in the name of COVID-19, and will surely submit to both novel medical procedures and invasive private databases just for a chance to return to normalcy, moral governance ought to protect them from being coerced into that choice at all — and should protect those who still refuse from being treated as second-class citizens.

To Stop COVID Passports, Target Databases

The databases are going to have to be digital to make sense, for speed, for efficiency, and because people will otherwise forge paperwork. The only effective way to go after them will be to prohibit any sort of digital database that collects or distributes personal medical data, and to make it a crime for organizations not covered by HIPAA to make services conditional on a customer granting access to medical data.

Organizations that are covered by HIPAA include doctors, clinics, pharmacies, nursing homes, and health-care plans, among others.

If a business is not among those then it is not allowed to ask for access to your medical records. This will both protect privacy and prevent medical coercion, and when added to executive orders like those in Florida and Texas, will deal a death blow to the plan to force the COVID regime of the past year onto American citizens for years and decades to come.

Databases aren’t theoretical, they are here, and they are spreading among us. The time to snuff this emerging corporate-government tyranny is now — or never.

Demand that politicians break with the political, corporate, and global ruling class, advises Mr. Bedford. Americans “cannot afford to fight a reactionary rearguard battle — as is our habit — on this. Ask your governor and your legislators to be proactive in defense of your freedoms.”