Bill Gates and Mastercard are testing vaccine passports in Africa. Is the US next?

The Bill Gates-backed Gavi, also known as the Vaccine Alliance, Mastercard, and NGOs in the fintech space have been trialing a digital vaccine passport in Africa called the Wellness Pass. Africa has long been a testing ground for Big Pharma to test drugs and programs far from the prying eyes of journalists and regulators.

This passport, touted as a handy way to track patients in “underserved communities” across “multiple touchpoints,” is part of a grouping of consumer-facing Mastercard products aimed ostensibly at roping people into a cashless digital ID system that simultaneously automates compliance with prescribed pharmaceutical regimens and fosters dependency on at least one ideologically captive non-governmental entity.

Gavi, the leading partner and “catalyst” for the initiative, and Mastercard, “acting in the capacity of technology partner,” rolled out pilots of the Wellness Pass in Mauritania and Ethiopia under the banner of “efficiently delivering vaccines to millions of children, tracking identity and immunization records in a digitized manner and incentivizing the delivery of vaccines.”

Gavi, originally the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, has historically provided children in the third world with non-mRNA vaccinations. But its reputation and reach in relatively unregulated regions — where it has worked in recent years to limit big pharmaceutical companies’ financial risk regarding COVID-19 vaccine injuries — are now being exploited to provide cover for experimentation by Western technocrats and corporate giants.

Brazen efforts to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in pursuit of greater power and a “new normal” have sadly cast doubt on purportedly altruistic endeavors such as this, already suspect in a region long used by pharmaceutical companies and other outfits as a sandbox for treacherous experiments.

Bill Gates’ apparent keenness to usher in a future where digital passport stamps attesting to dutiful acceptance of vaccines — including those of the kind he’s hawkish on developing in Africa — has increased suspicions that the initiative is a foretaste of efforts stateside to curb God-given freedoms.

Besides pledging more than $1.8 billion to Gavi between 2021 and June of this year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has bankrolled other similar efforts.

For instance, the foundation helped fund the World Health Organization’s 2021 “Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates: Vaccination Status” guidance, which discussed the deployment of a vaccine passport “solution to address the immediate needs of the pandemic but also to build digital health infrastructure that can be a foundation for digital vaccination certificates beyond COVID-19.” It’s worth noting that the Gates Foundation provides the WHO with nearly as much financing as the U.S. government yearly.

The Gates Foundation also recently funded research into biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots indicating vaccination status, applied to the skin with microneedles. One needn’t be a biblical scholar to draw a parallel with the mark of the beast.

Despite its potentially nefarious applications, the Wellness Pass is thankfully not another Gates tattoo. Instead, more in line with the passport discussed in the WHO guidance, it is a chip card that stores a patient’s vaccine history offline.

According to Gavi, the pass, which appears to have outlived IBM’s Digital Health Pass and has the potential to give the World Economic Forum’s CommonPass app a run for its money, ensures that “vaccination records are available at any time through participating health facilities, regardless of connectivity, and utilizes tokenized biometrics when accepted, or alternatively a pin, to verify service delivery and adhere to vaccination cycles.”

The card is reportedly linked to a phone number so that jab appointment reminders can be sent.

During the pandemic, both in blue states and increasingly unfree Anglo nations like Australia and Canada, we saw vaccine receipts and QR codes become necessary to travel and use various facilities.

On the one hand, Gavi and the world’s second-largest payment processing corporation are working to ensure human test subjects are up to date on their vaccines. On the other hand, Africans appear to be unwittingly helping them beta-test improved biometric systems of control for potential deployment farther afield.

Already, bit players involved in the project have made the logical progression from the Sahara to the States. For instance, the AI-powered biometric company Trust Stamp helped incorporate its digital identification tech into the Wellness Pass system early on, then turned its focus stateside, developing applications for the American prison industry.

Gareth Genner, co-founder of Trust Stamp, said something revealing in a 2020 interview with Mastercard. Genner suggested that the hope for this technology was that “anyone in the world can say, ‘This is who I am and these are what my needs are.’”

The Wellness Pass similarly conveys identifying information and needs through what it does not say: This is what I am not; ergo these are what needs I can be denied.

During the pandemic, both in blue states and increasingly unfree Anglo nations like Australia and Canada, we saw vaccine receipts and QR codes become necessary to travel and use various facilities. Those without these prototypic vaccine passports often saw their liberties and horizons drastically limited.

An Americanized Wellness Pass, even if adopted with the pseudo-anonymized hash system used in Africa, would grant authorities similar limiting potential as before, along with a far better sense of where there were pockets of dissent, where they had to propagandize, and where there were arms yet unjabbed.

Besides helping to further shape behavior, flush out vaccine resistance, and medicalize society, such an infrastructure as Mastercard provides could lay the groundwork for the kinds of digital credentialing systems Americans have been otherwise resistive to.

Alisdair Haythornthwaite, senior vice president of thought leadership and policy communications at Mastercard, told USA Today in 2020, “There is nothing about this solution that means someone who doesn’t get vaccinated won’t get money or food.”

Sure, that might have been true of Wellness Pass as deployed in Mauritania, but time will tell what Western systems informed by these African pilot programs might ultimately accomplish in the way of prohibitions in the name of public health, climate correction, countering extremism, and so forth.

Forgive my skepticism about the beneficence of behemothic corporations, but it’s not hard to imagine soon being required to produce a Wellness Pass simply to pass go.