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THE VACCINE EXPERIMENT BEGINS

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | December 18, 2020

Facts about Covid Vaccine rollout: What happened in Australia?; New HCQ study with Dr. Zelenko; Dr. Bhakdi on the Covid shot; Dr. Gold’s 5-point plan

December 17, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

US designates anti-govt. Bahraini group as ‘terrorist’ after Manama inks peace deal with Israel

Press TV | December 16, 2020

The administration of outgoing US President Donald Trump has designated Bahraini opposition group Saraya al-Mukhtar as a “terrorist” organization, months after the Manama regime agreed to a Washington-brokered normalization with Israel.

In a statement released on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said his office had blacklisted the group as “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” claiming that it was “posing a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

He alleged that Saraya al-Mukhtar receives “financial and logistic support” from Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and seeks to depose the Bahraini government.

“The group has plotted attacks against US personnel in Bahrain and has offered cash rewards for the assassination of Bahraini officials,” Pompeo further claimed.

The designation freezes any of the group’s US assets and generally bars Americans from dealing with it.

Iran has not commented on the claims so far.

The Bahraini government welcomed the US blacklisting of Saraya al-Mukhtar.

The Bahraini Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it “commends” what it called “the relentless efforts undertaken by the United States of America in combatting all extremist terrorist organizations.”

Bahraini courts have already sentenced suspects allegedly linked to Saraya al-Mukhtar to years in prison and revoked their citizenship.

Several Bahraini groups have faced accusations of ties to Iran since 2011, when an uprising began in the kingdom against the ruling Al Khalifah regime. Tehran has, however, dismissed such allegations as false.

Analysts see the blacklisting as an American reward to Manama, months after it reached a US-brokered normalization deal with the Israeli regime.

The agreement sparked several angry street protests in Bahrain, with the participants slamming the regime in Manama for turning a deaf ear to the nation’s calls against making peace with the occupiers of Palestine.

In addition to Bahrain, the UAE, Sudan and Morocco have also reached similar agreements with Israel.

Joe Macaron, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, told the Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal that “the activities of Saraya al-Mukhtar have significantly diminished since 2018 but the Trump administration is standing by those Arab allies who normalized with Israel.”

“While Morocco got US recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara and Sudan was delisted as a state sponsor of terrorism, the Trump administration is showing support for Bahrain in a designation that has no real impact whatsoever,” he added.

Bahrain — home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet — has seen anti-regime protest rallies since the onset of the uprising. The major demand has been the ouster of the Al Khalifah dynasty and the establishment of a just and conclusive system representing all Bahraini nationals.

In an attempt to stifle those calls, the Manama regime has been pressing ahead with a heavy-handed crackdown against the protesters and persecution of human rights campaigners and political dissidents.

December 16, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , | Leave a comment

Pakistan returns $1 bln of Saudi Arabia’s loan over Kashmir dispute

MEMO | December 16, 2020

Pakistan has returned $1 billion to Saudi Arabia as a second installment of a $3 billion soft loan, as Islamabad reaches out to Beijing for a commercial loan to help it offset pressure to repay another $1 billion to Riyadh next month, officials said on Wednesday according to a report by Reuters.

Analysts say it is unusual for Riyadh to press for the return of money. But relations have been strained lately between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, historically close friends.

Saudi Arabia gave Pakistan a $3 billion loan and a $3.2 billion oil credit facility in late 2018. After Islamabad sought Riyadh’s support over alleged human rights violations by India in the disputed territory of Kashmir, Saudi Arabia has pushed Pakistan to repay the loan.

With the $1 billion flowing out, Pakistan – which has $13.3 billion in central bank foreign reserves – could face a balance of payments issue after clearing the next Saudi installment.

“China has come to our rescue,” a foreign ministry official told Reuters. A finance ministry official said Pakistan’s central bank was already in talks with Chinese commercial banks.

“We’ve sent $1 billion to Saudi Arabia,” he said. Another $1 billion will be repaid to Riyadh next month, he said. Islamabad had returned $1 billion in July.

Although a $1.2 billion surplus in its current account balance and a record $11.77 billion in remittances in the past five months have helped support the Pakistani economy, having to return the Saudi money is still a setback.

Pakistani army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who visited Riyadh in August to ease the tensions, met the Saudi ambassador in Islamabad on Tuesday.

December 16, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yes, Bill Gates Said That. Here’s the Proof.

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | Children’s Health Defense | December 11, 2020

Some chiseler altered Bill Gates’ June 2020 TED Talk to edit out his revealing prediction that we will all soon need digital vaccine passports (slide 1). But after considerable effort, we tracked down the original video (slide 2).

Gates’ minions on cable and network news, his public broadcasting, social media and fact-checker toadies all now insist that Gates never said such things. They say he never intended to track and trace us with subdermal chips or injected tattoos.

They dismiss such talk as “conspiracy theories.”

Well, here it is from the horse’s mouth.

In 2019, according to a not-yet-purged Scientific American article, Gates commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an injectable quantum dot dye system to tattoo stored medical info beneath children’s skin. The tattoo was designed to be readable by an iPhone app.

Gates’ company, Microsoft, has patented a sinister technology that uses implanted chips with sensors that will monitor body and brain activity. It promises to reward compliant humans with crypto currency payments when they perform assigned activities.

Gates also invested approximately $20 million in MicroCHIPS, a company that makes chip-based devices, including birth-control implant chips with wireless on/off switches for remote-controlled drug-delivery by medical authorities.

In July 2019, months before the COVID pandemic, Gates bought 3.7M shares of Serco, a military contractor with U.S. and UK government contracts to track and trace pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.

To facilitate our transition to his surveillance society, Gates invested $1 billion in EarthNow, which promises to blanket the globe in 5G video surveillance satellites. EarthNow will launch 500 satellites allowing governments and large enterprises to live-stream monitor almost every “corner” of the Earth, providing instantaneous video feedback with one-second delay.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also acquired 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle, which owns 5G spy antennas including more than 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 small cells.

Please make your own copy of these clips — as Gates’ power to disappear inconvenient facts is expanding every digital day.

December 14, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

The “Expert Consensus” Also Favored Alcohol Prohibition

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | December 11, 2020

Most people today regard America’s experiment with alcohol prohibition as a national embarrassment, rightly repealed in 1933. So it will be with the closures and lockdowns of 2020, someday.

In 1920, however, to be for the repeal of the prohibition that was passed took courage. You were arguing against prevailing opinion backed by celebratory scientists and exalted social thinkers. What you were saying flew in the face of “expert consensus.”

There is an obvious analogy to Lockdowns 2020.

My first inkling of this prohibition history came in reading transcripts of the then-famous Radio Priest James Gillis from the 1920s. He was against prohibiting alcohol production and sale on grounds that the social costs far outweighed the supposed benefits. What surprised me was the defensiveness of his comments. He had to assure his listeners that he was personally for temperance, that alcohol was indeed demon rum, that it’s true that this nasty stuff had caused terrible things to happen to the country. Still, he said, outright bans are too costly.

Why was he so cautious in his rhetoric? It turns out that during the 1920s, he was one of the few famous American public figures (H.L. Mencken was also among them) who dared to speak out against what was obviously a disastrous policy. Reading this sent me down a rabbit hole of literature at the time in which it was argued by many leading intellectuals that Prohibition made perfect sense as a necessary step to clean up the social order.

To sum up the “science” behind Prohibition, society had tremendous numbers of pathologies on the loose and they all traced to one dominant variable: liquor. There was poverty, crime, fatherless households, illiteracy, political alienation, social immobility, city squalor, and so on. You can look carefully at the data to find that in all these cases, there is a common element of alcohol. It only stands to reason that eliminating this factor would be the single greatest contribution to eliminating the pathologies. The evidence was incontrovertible. Do this, then that, and you are done.

To be sure, the argument wasn’t always this clean. Simon Patten (1852-1922) was chair of the Wharton School of Business. His late 19th-century argument for alcohol prohibition featured a complicated argument concerning the weather in America. It gets cold then hot then cold and alcohol consumption seems to track these changes, driving people to drink ever more until their lives fall apart.

As summarized by Mark Thornton, who is the leading scholar on the economics of Prohibition and its history, “For Patten, alcohol is a product with no equilibrium in consumption. One is either good and abstains from alcohol, or one becomes a drunkard and self-destructs.”

The most influential pro-Prohibition economist of the next generation was the rock star academic and social progressive Irving Fisher, whose contributions to making economics more about data than theory are legendary. So was his push for eugenics. No surprise if you know this period and such people, but he was also a passionate opponent of all alcohol. It was he who made a decisive difference in convincing Congress and the public that a complete ban was the right way. His oddly titled book Prohibition at Its Worst (1927) lays it all out.

The same year of its publication, Fisher called for a roundtable at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. His own account is revealing.

I got a list of the economists who are supposed to be opposed to Prohibition, and wrote to them; they all replied either that I was mistaken in thinking that they were opposed to Prohibition or that, if we were going to confine the discussion to the economics of Prohibition, they would not care to respond. When I found that I was to have no speaker representing the opposite point of view, I wrote to all American economists listed in “Minerva” and all American teachers of statistics. I have not received from any one an acceptance.

Clearly his colleagues were either bamboozled by the prevailing “science” or afraid to disagree with the reigning orthodoxy. Even as political establishments were being corrupted, crime and liquor lords were rising up all over the country, and tens of thousands of speakeasies were thriving. Claiming that Prohibition had created $6 billion in wealth for the U.S. – a figure that was frequently cited as authoritative, Fisher wrote the following:

Prohibition is here to stay. If not enforced, its blessings will speedily turn into a curse. There is no time to lose. Although things are much better than before Prohibition, with the possible exception of disrespect for law, they may not stay so. Enforcement will cure disrespect for law and other evils complained of, as well as greatly augment the good. American Prohibition will then go down in history as ushering in a new era in the world, in which accomplishment this nation will take pride forever.

To see how the $6 billion figure was calculated and to observe the rest of the astonishing mathematical gymnastics behind the “science” backing Prohibition, have a look at Thornton’s detailed presentation. It’s a perfect picture of pseudoscience in action.

But it was hardly unusual for the time. The Journal of the American Medical Association said of alcohol prohibition in 1920: “Most of us are convinced that it is one of the most beneficent acts ever passed by a legislature.” 

Reading through all this literature, I’m reminded of the CDC scientific conclusion that closing restaurants during a pandemic will save lives – a conclusion based on a study so weak that anyone with a passing familiarity with statistics and causality can immediately observe its failings (the same study, if it demonstrates that, would also demonstrate that masks make no difference in virus spread). Another obvious case was the brutal and unscientific closures of schools.

Also true is that the opponents of Prohibition were routinely and publicly denounced as secret drunks, shilling for bootleggers, or just not following the science. They were the outliers and stayed that way for a decade. What finally broke Prohibition was not the replacement of one scientific orthodoxy for another but the noncompliance on the part of most of the population. When enforcement became unviable, and FDR saw opposition to Prohibition as politically advantageous, the law finally changed.

When we look back on American history, Prohibition stands out as one of the craziest social and economic experiments of modern times. The very idea that the government, on its own authority and power, was going to purge from a Western society the production and distribution of alcohol, strikes us today as a millennarian pipedream, one that turned into disaster for the whole country.

We could say the same about lockdowns in 2020. Indeed, measuring the absurdities on a scale of extremism, the idea of lockdowns, with forceful human separation, mandatory masking, and the practical abolition of all large gatherings, fun, art, and travel, seems even more sadistically preposterous than alcohol prohibition.

The madness of crowds, often backed by the “best science,” never goes away. It just finds new forms of legal expression in new times. Only once the crowds come to their senses do the real scientists make a comeback and prevail, while the fake science that backed despotism pretends like it never happened.

December 13, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon searching for ‘vetted Official Twitter Partner’ to help it influence platform’s users

RT | December 11, 2020

The US Defense Department is looking to ramp up its real-time surveillance of social media and specifically seeking a contractor already trusted by Twitter to model and influence shifting public sentiment in real time.

The Pentagon is seeking a “small business” software developer that not only enjoys privileged status as a “vetted Official Twitter Partner” but is also capable of picking through the “entire Twitter historical archive for analysis” and monitoring conversations in more than 150 languages, according to a Thursday posting by the department’s Washington Headquarters Services.

The ideal Pentagon partner will be able to “ingest near-real-time social media feeds from Twitter and other platforms” while searching the data ‘firehose’ for multipart search terms, ideally in “most major languages” simultaneously. The program would have to be able to present the results of its real-time analysis “graphically in various formats,” including on “geospatial maps and over time horizons.”

From there, the Pentagon’s corporate colleague would be able to “compute and highlight trend analysis” as well as “sentiment analysis … based on shifting online attitudes.” Essentially, the Defense Department wants a computer program that can accurately ascertain the thoughts and emotions of the social media hive-mind – including tracking “public reactions and significant events as they spike” on any given platform – and alter them if the need arises.

The candidate would also have to be able to “distinguish between real authors and online bots which may be pushing disinformation” – though it’s not clear if the company has to be able to tell the Pentagon’s own bot army apart from garden-variety AI-powered accounts.

All of this information would be packaged into Excel spreadsheets and prioritized for government agencies in terms of what warrants “immediate attention” and what simply forms part of the background of current events.

The Pentagon already deploys multiple sophisticated tools to monitor and influence Twitter and other social media platforms. It was one of the earliest adopters of “sock puppet” software allowing a single individual to control numerous fake social media accounts, and has been working with software companies to measure and analyze “group dynamics” – supposedly to predict “cyber terrorism events” – on social platforms since at least 2012.

In August, the Pentagon inked a $12.2 million contract with Dataminr to perform services similar to those listed in Thursday’s posting. The collaboration was expected to last only three months, however, and was supposed to conclude by mid-November.

While the US military has tracked and infiltrated dissident groups for decades in ‘real life,’ its capabilities in both impersonating and monitoring human conversation online have exploded over the past decade as more of what is considered ‘war’ takes place in the minds of targeted populations. Using private contractors allows the government – technically bound by the First and Fourth Amendments forbidding it from impinging on Americans’ free speech or right of protection from unreasonable search and seizure – to ignore constitutional concerns, as it’s technically an independent corporation violating targets’ rights.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Politicians Criticize China’s Role in Hong Kong while Ignoring Canada’s Role in Haiti

By Yves Engler | Dissident Voice | December 11, 2020

For those who support a truly just foreign policy comparing Canadian politicians’ reactions to protests in Hong Kong and the slightly more populous Haiti is instructive. It reveals the extent to which this country’s politicians are forced to align with the US Empire.

Despite hundreds of thousands of Canadians having close ties with both Haiti and Hong Kong, only protests in the latter seem to be of concern to politicians.

Recently NDP MP Niki Ashton and Green MP Paul Manly were attacked ferociously in Parliament and the dominant media for participating in a webinar titled “Free Meng Wanzhou”. During the hullabaloo about an event focused on Canada’s arrest of the Huawei CFO, Manly — who courageously participated in the webinar, even if his framing of the issue left much to be desired — and Ashton — who sent a statement to be read at the event but responded strongly to the backlash in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press — felt the need to mention Hong Kong. Both the NDP (“Canada must do more to help the people of Hong Kong”) and Greens (“Echoes of Tiananmen Square: Greens condemn China’s latest assault on democracy in Hong Kong”) have released multiple statements critical of Beijing’s policy in Hong Kong since protests erupted there nearly two years ago. So have the Liberals, Bloc Québecois and Conservatives.

In March 2019 protests began against an extradition accord between Hong Kong and mainland China. Hong Kongers largely opposed the legislation, which was eventually withdrawn. Many remain hostile to Beijing, which later introduced an anti-sedition law to staunch dissent. Some protests turned violent. One bystander was killed by protesters. A journalist lost an eye after being shot by the police. Hundreds more were hurt and thousands arrested.

During more or less the same period Haiti was the site of far more intense protests and state repression. In July 2018 an uprising began against a reduction in subsidies for fuel (mostly for cooking), which morphed into a broad call for a corrupt and illegitimate president Jovenel Moïse to go. The uprising included a half dozen general strikes, including one that shuttered Port-au-Prince for a month. An October 2019 poll found that 81% of Haitians wanted the Canadian-backed president to leave.

Dozens, probably over 100, were killed by police and government agents. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other western establishment human rights organizations have all documented dozens of police killings in Haiti. More recently, Moïse has ruled by decree, sought to extend his term and to rewrite the constitution. Yet, I couldn’t find a single statement by the NDP or Greens, let alone the Liberals or Conservatives, expressing support for the pro-democracy movement in Haiti.

Even an equal number of statements from a Canadian political party would be less than adequate. Not only were the protests and repression far more significant in Haiti, the impact of a Canadian politician’s intervention is far more meaningful. Unlike in Hong Kong, the police responsible for the repression in Haiti were trained, financed and backed by Canada. The Trudeau government even gave $12.5 million to the Haitian police under its Feminist International Assistance Policy! More broadly, the unpopular president received decisive diplomatic and financial support from Ottawa and Washington. In fact, a shift in Canada/US policy towards Moïse would have led to his ouster. On the other hand, a harder Canada/US policy towards Hong Kong would have led to well … not much.

The imperial and class dynamics of Haiti are fairly straightforward. For a century Washington has consistently subjugated the country in which a small number of, largely light-skinned, families dominate economic affairs. During the past 20 years Canada has staunchly supported US efforts to undermine Haitian democracy and sovereignty.

Hong Kong’s politics are substantially more complicated. Even if one believes that most in Hong Kong are leery of Beijing’s growing influence — as I do — the end of British rule and reintegration of Hong Kong into China represents a break from a regrettable colonial legacy. Even if you take an entirely unfavorable view towards Beijing’s role there, progressive Canadians shouldn’t focus more on criticizing Chinese policy in Hong Kong than Canadian policy in Haiti.

Echoing an open letter signed by David Suzuki, Roger Waters, Linda McQuaig and 150 others and the demands of those who occupied Justin Trudeau’s office last year, the national president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, Chris Aylward, recently sent a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau critical of Canadian support for Moïse. It notes, “Canada must reassess its financial and political support to the Jovenel Moïse government, including police training, until independent investigations are conducted into government corruption in the Petrocaribe scandal and ongoing state collusion with criminal gangs.” The NDP, Greens and others should echo the call.

To prove they are more concerned with genuinely promoting human rights – rather than aligning with the rulers of ‘our’ empire – I humbly suggest that progressive Canadians hold off on criticizing Beijing’s policy towards Hong Kong until they have produced an equal number of statements critical of Canada’s role in Haiti.

• To learn more about Canada’s role in Haiti tune into this webinar Sunday on “Imperialist attacks on Haiti and Haitian resistance: Canada’s Imperialist Adventures in Haiti.”


Yves Engler is the author of 10 books, including A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

New Documentary Sheds Light On Israel’s Strict Prohibitions On Interracial Marriage

By Eric Striker – National Justice – December 9, 2020

In 1967 Jewish activists sued to overturn bans on interracial marriage in America, yet in 2020, the Jewish state retains the strictest miscegenation laws in the world.

This is the subject of a new Press TV documentary on Israelis who are not allowed to marry by the country’s Rabbinate. Some couples use a loophole that allows them to marry abroad, but with COVID travel restrictions this has become impossible.

The Zionist state does not allow its citizens to obtain a civil marriage. Jewish apologists will often assert that Israel’s marriage laws are primarily motivated by the population’s concern with religious tradition, but a Gallup survey has found that Israel is one of the least religious countries in the world.

Under the rules set by the Rabbinate, a Jew who seeks to marry an individual who might be racially impure under Halakhic law must subject their spouse to DNA tests in order to prove their “genetic Jewishness.” Converts to Judaism and communities such as Ethiopian Jews are also largely banned from wedding.

Though Israel’s population is 75% Jewish and the country is highly secular, 98% of Jews say their friends are mostly or only Jewish. 89% of Jews also say they would not accept their child marrying a Gentile, going as high as 97% were the theoretical partner a Muslim.

While mixing in general is rare, the Israeli state funds initiatives every year intended to discourage Jews from dating outside their race. A street organization composed of Jewish men called Lehava patrol more cosmopolitan neighborhoods in Jerusalem and beat up interracial couples.

Jews in the United States are also known as the people who pioneered gay marriage, but in Israel same-sex marriage is prohibited.

In Israel marriage is a respected institution that enjoys fierce government protection. 50% of Jews marry by the age of 25, while in America only 29% of people between the ages of 18 to 34 are married.

With 95% of American Jews affirming support for the state of Israel, the sincerity of our country’s vanguard of “tolerance,” cosmopolitanism and social liberalism ought to be brought into question.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Remembering the Intifada and its prisoners of freedom: “Ansar III: The Camp of Slow Death”

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | December 9, 2020

The great Palestinian popular intifada (uprising) that mobilized, organized and unified the Palestinian masses – especially inside occupied Palestine, but also in the refugee camps, in exile and in diaspora – launched in December 1987. As we recall its 33rd anniversary, we note that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – some estimates reaching up to 600,000 – were arrested, detained and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces during the Intifada.

There, they experienced severe torture under interrogation, harsh conditions of confinement, medical neglect and abuse, collective punishment and home demolitions targeting their families, brutal beatings and mistreatment and the widespread and systematic use of administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial. Inside the prisons, however, despite all forms of repression, generations of Palestinian organizers developed “revolutionary schools” of politics, literature and organizing, developing powerful young activists to return to the streets embroiled in a great popular uprising.

In a failed attempt to suppress the Intifada, the Israeli occupation launched new prison camps and detention centers to hold the thousands of Palestinians detained in mass arrests throughout occupied Palestine. The following historical booklet, published in English in 1988 by ROOTS and Friends of Palestinian Prisoners, focuses on one such prison camp: Ansar III, “a barbed wire compound in the heart of the Negev desert.” At the time of the booklet’s publication, Janet Jubran of the Friends of Palestinian Prisoners noted in her introduction, “In one year, since the Intifada began, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been arrested. At this moment, nearly every family has one or more of its members in prison.”

This powerful booklet, including documentation, testimony and facts about Ansar III and its Palestinian prisoners – including many labor leaders, human rights defenders and journalists – was a part of the burgeoning organizing of Palestinian communities in exile and diaspora (in this case, in the United States) and the growing movement of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network is republishing this booklet today, on the 33rd anniversary of the Intifada, to bring this important historical document to new audiences, continuing to build upon this legacy of struggle, standing with the Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and return. 

Download the PDF here: Download PDF

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Canadian Health Ministry Exploring “Immunity Passports,” Vaccine “Tracking And Surveillance”

By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 9, 2020

The Health Minister of Ontario in Canada has stoked controversy by suggesting that people who do not take the coronavirus vaccine will face restrictions on where they can travel and spend time.

When asked by reporters about how the government intends to go about convincing people to get the vaccine, Health Minister Christine Elliott warned that those who refuse it will face difficulties reintegrating into society.

“That’s their choice, this is not going to be a mandatory campaign. It will be voluntary,” Elliot said, but adding that “There may be some restrictions that may be placed on people that don’t have vaccines for travel purposes, to be able to go to theatres and other places.”

When another reporter asked if the government would be introducing ‘immunity passports’, or proof of vaccination cards, Elliot said “Yes, because that’s going to be really important for people to have for travel purposes, perhaps for work purposes, for going to theatres or cinemas or any other places where people will be in closer physical contact.”

Following up on Elliot’s comments, The Toronto Sun spoke to her press secretary, who confirmed that the government is exploring several options for vaccine “tracking and surveillance.”

“This includes exploring developing tech-based solutions while also providing for alternative options to ensure equitable access to any potential ‘immunity passport,’” Alexandra Hilkene said.

Sun reporter Brian Lilley notes “That phrase will set off alarm bells and it should, not just for anti-vaxxers, but for anyone who is concerned about Charter rights and governments running roughshod over them.”

Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams has also said that a COVID-19 vaccine may be required for “freedom to move around”.

“What we can do is to say sometimes for access, or ease, in getting into certain settings, if you don’t have vaccination then you’re not allowed into that setting without other protection materials,” Williams said.

The comments of these Canadian officials add to the litany of other government and travel industry figures in both the US, Britain and beyond who have suggested that ‘COVID passports’ are coming, in order for ‘life to get back to normal’

In an essay in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden noted that he expects the so called ‘immunity passports’ will come into widespread use despite any ethical, legal or operational challenges, and despite the fact that it hasn’t at all been determined whether the vaccine equates to immunity.

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment