The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ARE VACCINE PASSPORTS GOING AWAY?

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

ARE VACCINE PASSPORTS GOING AWAY?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Over the last several weeks, we sort of keep gloating about the transitions, the changes, the winds that we're seeing all around us. It feels like the wheels are coming off of this crazy ship we've all been stuck on for some time. But as we watch the news, I wonder, should we be excited, should we be complacent, should we be attentive? All of those things are running through my mind as I watch headlines like this. Denver plans to lift its vaccine mandate. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pushing ahead with an end to almost all restrictions to contain the virus. In Alberta, people are waking up to a very new reality, one without vaccine passports. The mandates that help slow the spread are coming to an end in New York.

Well, customers dining in Minneapolis and St. Paul will no longer need to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test. We are announcing today that we will remove the indoor mask mandate. and the vaccine requirement for certain public locations. The Prime Minister has declared it's time for governments to step back out of people's lives as he called for an end to vaccine mandates. Mayor Eric Adams said that he would end the city's indoor vaccine mandate on March 7th.

The Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe saying that it created two classes of people and led to divisions. So the passports are going. Ontario is dropping most of its pandemic rules. Proof of vaccination will no longer be. required at most restaurants and gyms and movie theaters. Capacity limits for sports and concert venues dropped. Let us learn to live with this virus and continue protecting ourselves and others without restricting

our freedoms. You know, for many months now, we've been talking about the fact that maybe this wasn't just about trying to get everybody vaccinated around the planet, that perhaps the vaccine was just the tip of a spear of an individual. agenda to create a reason to track all of us. We've discussed these vaccine passports. And as I was watching the news and hearing the sound of those vaccine passports being, you know, taken back that we're not going to do it. Withdrawn in New York and all around the world, I was getting kind of excited. But then I saw a headline that struck me. This was the headline that I saw last week.

A national vaccine pass has quietly rolled out and red states are getting on board. This was on Forbes. Well, to get deeper into this question and see if there's answers, I want to bring on somebody that's been looking deeper into this than I have. Nick Corbushly is an author. He's a reporter. He's written the book scanned that can be found at Amazon, and he joins me now. Nick, can we be relaxed? I mean, in some ways, I feel like we've won the battle. But this idea of tracking systems that seemed like, you know, the technocrats of the world had joined with farming.

in this great decision to try and, you know, create technologies to see what we're all doing, what we're feeling, what's happening. Is that gone or is there something that we shouldn't need to be aware of? Well, Bell, thanks for having me on. You bet. It's a pleasure to be with you. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think we should, we need to be more vigilant than ever right now because we are, what we are being told does not coincide. with what is happening behind the scenes.

We need to be watching what our politicians do rather than just listening to what they say. Okay. And what we are, what I reported in an article yesterday, Fuget on Negative Capitalism, the World Health Organization, an organization that basically decides the guidelines that inform, inform health policy for 193 of its member countries around the world,

it is beginning to, or is considering shifting its policy regarding vaccine passports to embracing them and encouraging all its members to use them to govern, to control global travel. This is a huge shift for an organization that for about a year has not been doing this. It has been resisting the pressure to accept vaccine passports on the grounds that it would be discriminatory, on the grounds that we still don't know what the vaccine passports, how effective the vaccines associated passports are. So we're in a situation where we know by now that the vaccine. vaccines themselves are extremely ineffective when it comes to controlling the transmission of this virus. Yet at the same time, the World Health Organization is strongly encouraging, or is considering strongly

encouraging. It's member countries to use vaccine passport systems to govern the entrance of people or the crossing of people. of borders. This is a huge shift. Well, how are they going to be able to do that? I mean, let's just talk reasonably, you know, between us. We are watching, you know, state of the unions. We're watching these discussions where the mask mandates themselves are being lifted. So if you don't have a mask mandate, you're no longer afraid of the virus. Therefore, you can't really push the vaccine any longer.

You've even got President Biden saying, we all need to put our differences aside and come back together in a kumbaya moment. That seems to be the sentiment in the UK. We are, I think we've even seen the first airline in the UK opening up and saying we're not going to have masks in our airline So it looks like even travel is going to move away from that how in the face of that climate? Does the WHO feel like they would have any success Getting us, you know, to accept a vaccine passport when we are so far away from that terror that was needed, I think, for us to agree to something like that? Well, I mean, I think that if you look at many of the countries in Europe, for example, there was not that much resistance to the vaccine passports.

There has been, certainly in Germany, there was enormous resistance to the idea of vaccine mandates. And we saw in Austria quite a lot of resistance to, it now has a vaccine mandate. But what the vaccine passports have done, in my view, that they've allowed this kind of conditioning, of the people to this idea of waving their mobile phone in front of the sensor in order to access the most basic of things. And the fact that we are now withdrawing it from domestic application

means that everybody is happy. They think that we are going back to some semblance of normality. But for international travel, that simply is not the case. So if you want to travel from Europe to the United States, you need to have a vaccine passport. You need to be up to date with your vaccines. And it goes the other way. If you're going from the US to Europe and the EU, then, and this is, this is, it's still there. It's maybe being kind of like pushed to the, to the background. But we are in a situation where the European Union is also in desperate to extend the, validity of the vaccine passport that it has the green pass for another year so I mean it's not going away it's not being used in the kind of like more overt sort of

like applications that we've seen at a domestic level and people are kind of like happy with that which is good yeah but this the fact that the World Health Organization is talking about imposing it but it's not imposing it. This is very important to point out the World Health Organization cannot impose any health policy on any country. All you can do is make recommendations. It can produce guidelines and these inform what policies countries adopt. But that also can change. This is something that really does scare me because in the next year or two, we are likely to see the creation of a kind of like a global pandemic treaty.

Yeah. And again, this is not being reported much. This will very much change the way health policy is carried out. We have that headline. Let me just show that again for people that just bring that back up very quickly. We reported on this last week. The World Health Assembly agrees to launch process to develop historic global accord on pandemic prevention preparedness and response.

This is sort of a one world health government. that will make treaties and statements that all the member nations, which you have to assume sort of every leading First World Nation, the world will certainly have signed on, and many others, will have to sort of agree that the WHO makes these decisions. I think the danger of this, of course, is we, and I've been saying we can no longer call it the World Health Organization. I believe it's the World Health Order

is the better way to describe the direction that they're heading. And these are globalist and global controls of unelected officials. That's the problem I think of what we've seen here is we have health departments making decisions that are affecting our economies, our jobs, our lives, our education, our schools, our health, you know, and all of that by people we are not electing, which I think is very problematic. Do you think that there's the potential, and I think some of the articles here talking about Texas, is that they're going to sort of use a bait and switch. They're going to make us feel that the vaccine passport has been taken away when actually maybe they're just rebranding it, changing the name. to digital IDs or things like that. Is there, you know, what do we need to be looking for as ways that they might try to slip this into our experience and sort of just take the languishing and shift it?

Is that happening out there? I mean, it's happening in quite a few jurisdictions. So I mean, many countries, including my own United Kingdom. I live in Spain, but I'm from the UK. So the UK has, as it was kind of like beginning the United Kingdom, the withdrawal of the restrictions, it was also, it also very, very covertly launched this digital identity program. And the way it was able to justify it was for the, to allow employers to check the identity of their workers or their new hires. So, I mean, like that, there's always a possible justification that they can come up with.

A more egregious example was in Canada recently. So you had the examples you mentioned in the preamble where you had Ontario saying that we are definitely moving out of the vaccine passports, the vaccine mandates are going, we are, the restrictions are being left behind. And I remember Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario saying that, you know, it doesn't matter if you've had one vaccine or two vaccines or three vaccines. you can still carry this virus and spread it. And it all sounded wonderful and everybody was delighted to hear it. The problem was at the same time as he was saying, his government was preparing a new program to launch digital identity that that will include, and this is a dark part,

that will include your vaccine status. So, and the same goes for our last. Alberta, we've got digital identity programs being rolled out in Australia, in New Zealand. So I mean, like, throughout the world, the European Union is developing a very, very ambitious program to kind of like create this digital identity wallet that will essentially include everything, as well as probably your vaccination status. So that would be my question, as we're looking at this, and I know your book scanned gets into a lot of different things. You know, you're deep into looking at cryptocurrencies, government's involvement, you know, the future of technologies, AI and where we're going.

When we think about these, you know, digital IDs, whatever they do, is our biggest concern that it's going to have our medical records or are there things that you're more worried about that these digital IDs, the technologies of what they can do? What should we, you know, what does the future look like for those people developing digital ID programs? I mean, the future looks bright for those people. It looks very beautiful.

And they're very excited. There's going to be lots of money making opportunities. But for the future for the rest of us, if this takes root, if it becomes part of our normality, then, yeah, it's not going to be a very nice future. I mean, what you say about the health records, that is an important element. our health records are among the most important data about who we are and that are extremely valuable for companies and for governments to know. But I think it goes far beyond that. I mean, if you are looking at the possibility of biometric details, for the moment, most vaccine passports

do not include that. But if you look at what many of the developers of this identity is saying, we're likely to see the use of biometric identifiers. One of the scariest aspects is this idea of central bank digital currencies. So this idea of linking up digital identity to financial system so that you can have a situation which we saw recently in Canada where the government can essentially turn off your your access to your money, your bank account. We've also seen something similar happen. I remember that we saw in Canada just to point out to people that maybe didn't follow that.

Something is simply, you know, going to a GoFundMe page and saying, I believe in that. I want to see some truckers get fed while they're sort of standing up for their rights. Those people could have their bank accounts turned off for that. And then imagine you're in a court system fighting the government with what money? What lawyer can you afford to pay to represent you as you're trying to to get your bank account opened up. I mean, it's really a terrifying prospect.

Absolutely, and that should be a warning to us all. And the problem is it wasn't reported very widely outside Canada, especially here in Europe, most people didn't even hear about it. But we saw a similar thing happen in Moscow, in Russia, over the last couple of days, where Apple Pay and Google pay would do their services, and you had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Russian people suddenly unable to pay for things. And this is this is a scary thing as we move towards a kind of digital money system,

which is what our central banks are certainly trying to do right now. Then the idea of this being connected to our digital identity, that gives them an enormous amount of power. It's the power to cut us off from the economy. And so, yeah, that is something that probably terrifies me the most. And, you know, it's something that is becoming more and more possible as technologies evolved. Since you're looking at this, how do we follow the work that you're doing? I mean, you know, you're writing about it, you're investigating. Obviously, we have your book, but what's the best way to follow your articles as you continue this investigation?

Okay. Well, I mean, the book, as you said, the book I've just written, called Scanned, why vaccine passports and digital identity will mean the end of privacy and personal freedom. And you can get that from Amazon, you can get that from Chubes of Green. You get that from any, for the moment, any self-respecting bookshop in the US and the UK. I think it comes out on the 17th of March, but you can say to pre-order it. Great. My work is published twice a week on the US financial economics blog, naked capitalism.com. And you can follow me on Twitter and my handle is Nick, obviously. Nick, I want to thank you for taking the time to join us today,

but more especially to be taking the time to investigate where most of mainstream media is not looking. People like you out there are our hope. And, you know, in your last words and thoughts, for people watching right now, what is your advice as we move, you know, closer and closer to, these AI technologies, these tracking softwares, what can we do as citizens to maybe make sure that the world continues to be a free and open market and place where we can share our thoughts freely?

Well, I'll say number one, don't allow yourself to be divided in the way they're wanting us to be divided. Try to avoid that as much as possible. It doesn't serve anybody's purpose. apart from those with power, I think that cash is a very useful thing to be using as much as possible right now. It's the last thing that central banks and the banks and governments and large, many large corporations and tech firms want us to be doing. And I think just share the word. And there are a lot of people out there who are fully vaccinated who have had the virus in the last two or three months, who are beginning to see a slightly different way the world is.

And they are open to, I think, new ideas. So I think share the word. Speak to people as much as possible. Fantastic. Nick Corbusly, you take care. Keep up the good work and hopefully we'll have you on the show soon. Thank you very much, Del. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.