Vaccine passports in major cities will be viewed as an abuse of political power for ulterior motives, Robert Bridge writes.
Apartheid conditions are being created in Western countries between the vaccinated and ‘anti-vaxxers.’ And with the introduction of vaccine passports, which could theoretically deny the unvaccinated the most basic and essential services, things could get ugly very fast.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. What began as “15 days to flatten the curve,” and then as a voluntary vaccination program, is now steamrolling into a form of government overreach as the simple things people took for granted – visiting a restaurant, going to a theater and riding the train – will soon require a mandatory vaccine passport. Will citizens quietly accept these unprecedented measures without a fight? Thus far it does not look promising.
While the average consumer of mainstream media news rarely hears about them, massive anti-vaccine and lockdown protests, with crowd sizes not seen since the days leading up to the Iraq War of 2003, have been rocking all parts of the Western world. Last week, for example, thousands ignored Germany’s ban on anti-Covid measures and took to the street in mass protest. One protester reportedly died after breaking through a police barricade. Several police officers were injured in the melee that led to the arrest of 600 demonstrators. And as governments begin their rollout of health passes amid broad skepticism over the safety of the Covid vaccines, the resistance promises to escalate.
France, for example, even as natural herd immunity and vaccination rates among the population climb, is laying the groundwork for a nationwide vaccine passport system. On Aug. 9, French citizens will be required to prove a vaccination, a negative coronavirus test or proof of having recently recovered from Covid-19 to enter a number of public spaces, including restaurants, museums and mass transportation. Italy is starting a similar program on August 6. Imagine being the one to tell an Italian or a Frenchman that they are barred from entering their favorite corner café for lack of documentation. Meanwhile, health-care workers in France will be required to be vaccinated by mid-September. Union workers say they will protest the demands.
As to be expected, the French, who know a thing or two about revolutionary movements, have not taken the news lying down. Since President Emmanuel Macron made the announcement three weeks ago, demonstrators have been staging mass protests, attacking vaccination clinics and generally behaving like furious mobs tend to behave – furiously.
Incredible fast-motion footage capturing the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets in Paris this past weekend to protest Macron’s edict for digital health pass checks at all shops, restaurants, and transportation.pic.twitter.com/01T5fu6kzo
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) July 20, 2021
With his characteristic smugness and total lack of self-awareness, Macron jeered the demonstrators, who find the prospect of playing bureaucratic chutes and ladders for the rest of their lives absolutely repulsive if not downright tyrannical.
“A few tens of thousands of people have lost their minds to such an extent that they are capable of saying we live in a dictatorship,” Macron said in an interview with Paris Match, according to excerpts released online before the article is published on Thursday. “Their attitude is a threat to democracy. They mix up everything.”
Funny how the French leader fails to see that by threatening the livelihood of millions of people – who simply wish to have a voice and maybe even a vote as to what is done in the name of science to their bodies – is the real “threat to democracy.”
Meanwhile, the people of Australia are experiencing conditions that could best be described as de facto martial law. Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, is nearing the seventh week of a nine-week lockdown where citizens are forbidden from leaving home except to purchase food, seek medical assistance, and perform an “essential” job. The lengthy lockdown in Australia’s largest city has triggered massive street demonstrations, where many people can’t understand the reaction to a mere 10 COVID-19 deaths related to the current outbreak.
Massive Crowds Sydney Australia July 24th World Wide Freedom Rally Protest pic.twitter.com/YjIbUV5eFs
— hugotalks (@hugotalks1) July 24, 2021
Amid the harshest lockdown orders to be imposed yet Down Under, some 300 troops are working with the police to monitor people in quarantine, as well as organize road checks. Vehicles containing more than two people are being pulled over for inspection.
With the lockdown in Sydney not expected to end until August 28, rumors are already rife that the government will extend the lockdown orders as reports of Delta-related deaths circulate.
NIH director Francis Collins: “It may sound weird” but parents should wear masks at home in front of their unvaccinated kids pic.twitter.com/ZKt8czU5aP
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 3, 2021
Meanwhile, back in the United States, the Covid pandemic often appears to be more of a partisan beast of burden than a medical scourge. Conservative writer Victor Davis Hanson summed up the divisive climate festering across the country when he reminded that it was the Biden administration, teamed up with Big Media, which “blame-gamed unvaccinated ‘super-spreaders’ for sometimes infecting those already vaccinated—as if the over 100 million adults still not fully vaccinated were red-state rubes who packed honky-tonk bars and motorcycle rallies.”
Demonstrating that the reality was quite different, Hanson reminded that last summer “over 1,000 medical providers had given blanket exemptions solely to BLM protestors, dangerously to mass in the streets for weeks on end to demonstrate.”
He also pointed to the disaster on the U.S.-Mexican border, where “two million illegal aliens are scheduled to cross the southern border in the next year—with legal impunity, but without vaccinations, or COVID-19 tests, or lectures from Washington.”
At the same time, a recent breakout of COVID-19 in Provincetown, Massachusetts “was not due to alt-right Neanderthals,” Hanson noted. “It was attributable to the annual gay pride celebrations where some thousands of partiers swarmed bars, clubs, restaurants, and hotels.”
That’s certainly not something the mainstream media thought to cover.
On top of this glaring hypocrisy is an oppressive, censuring climate that has halted medical inquiry in its tracks as though skepticism and scientific progress were mutually exclusive things. Indeed,even medical doctors who dare question the wisdom of emergency-use, non-FDA-approved vaccines, mask wearing and social distancing regulations is turned into a social media pariah and disappeared. Despite, or because of, the conspicuous lack of free and open debate on the science behind Covid, Democratic cities and states are rushing to implement a vaccine passports like the ones now emerging in Europe.
Starting on September 13, New York City, bucking the wisdom that California is the national trendsetter, will bar the unvaccinated from fitness clubs, restaurants and theaters. Aside from potentially delivering the final death blow to many small businesses in the megapolis, the so-called ‘Key to NYC Pass’ will likely fuel the exodus out of the Big Apple that began in March 2020. For those New Yorkers who choose to remain, while also refusing the vaccine, resentment and anger at being denied the things that make urban living possible will be difficult to contain.
This is ridiculous and now is moving into compete and utter discrimination. Some people in CA have religious and medical exemptions from the vaccine. So those individuals can’t get groceries, pet food, or supplies? How do you expect people to live?
— Aimee Glocke (@AimeeGlocke) August 4, 2021
Meanwhile, across the country, in yet another liberal super state, Los Angeles is mulling a proposal similar to New York’s albeit one that includes “retail stores.” In other words, without a vaccine pass many people may find it very difficult to purchase food and medicine.
With millions of Americans still hesitant about receiving a vaccine that has not been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the introduction of vaccine passes in America’s two largest cities – nudged along with no small assistance from CNN, it appears – will ramp up tensions at a time when many people are already concerned about keeping food on the table in unpredictable economic times.
All things considered, the sanctioning of vaccine passports in major cities around the world will be viewed not as a necessary medical tool for keeping people healthy, but rather as an abuse of political power for ulterior motives that have nothing in common with democracy.
