“IN JUST A FEW MONTHS, the new rules have turned my country into a two-tier society of discrimination and hate. Restriction by restriction, it is shredding the bonds that hold us all together in one society.” These are the words of Gluboco Lietuva, a Lithuanian husband and father of two children. Neither he nor his wife is vaccinated. On September 21, 2021, he posted a Twitter feed that went viral. In it he chronicled what life was now like after the Lithuanian government had become one of the first EU members to apply the Green Pass to just about every facet of life. He wanted the rest of the world to know what awaits them. It was a story that virtually no international newspaper was bothering to report.
“Without a Pass, you may not enter any shopping center or large supermarket,” wrote Lietuva. “At the entrances, people queue in line to be verified. Guards scan the Pass of each person. If you have a valid Pass, the light flashes green and beeps. Then you may enter. No Pass, no entrance.”1
Without the Lithuanian government’s Orwellian-dubbed “Opportunity Pass,” Lithuanians cannot enter a restaurant, café, or bar. They cannot step inside a “non-essential” store. They cannot attend higher education or vocational training programs. They cannot access indoor public events or spaces such as conferences, fitness centers, or hair and nail beauty services.2
Lithuania introduced no-holes barred segregation in August 2021, ostensibly to “prevent rising coronavirus cases from overwhelming the health care system and to protect people who cannot get vaccinated.”3 Yet the infection curve continued to rise. By early November it was higher than at any other time during the pandemic. Yet the restrictions stayed in place.
“In just six weeks, the COVID pass has turned my country into a regime of control and segregation,” wrote Lietuva. “This is the new society created in Lithuania, the nation furthest along the path to authoritarianism inevitably facing all countries which impose a COVID Pass regime.”
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the global economy, economic inequality and social divisions were rising fast across the globe. The year 2019 was “the year of protest.” In its final issue of the year, the New Yorker reported that movements had “emerged overnight, out of nowhere, unleashing public fury on a global scale—from Paris and La Paz to Prague and Port-au-Prince, Beirut to Bogota and Berlin, Catalonia to Cairo, and in Hong Kong, Harare, Santiago, Sydney, Seoul, Quito, Jakarta, Tehran, Algiers, Baghdad, Budapest, London, New Delhi, Manila, and even Moscow.”4
The economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis has turbocharged these inequalities. In 2020, the world’s billionaires earned considerably more billions than they had even done before, largely thanks to the unprecedented monetary stimulus unleashed by global central banks. The rich were made whole while hundreds of millions of people lost their livelihoods. Now, the stealth emergence of vaccine passports threaten to take economic inequality to a whole new level, by creating a permanent economic underclass while ushering in new forms of tech-enabled discrimination and segregation.
The prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern openly admitted that her policies will create two classes of people.5 “If you are still unvaccinated, not only will you be more at risk of catching COVID-19, but many of the freedoms others enjoy will be out of reach,” she said. “No-one wants that to happen but we need to minimise the threat of the virus, which is now mainly spreading amongst unvaccinated people.”6
Two points in this statement are simply not true. Evidence—as I showed in chapter 1—is stacking up that people who are vaccinated represent a similar contagion threat as those who aren’t. According to a study published in Lancet in late October, someone who is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 yet catches the virus is equally infectious to members of their household as an infected unvaccinated person. Someone fully vaccinated has a 25 percent probability of catching the virus from an infected household member while an unvaccinated contact has a 38 percent probability.7
In other words, according to the Lancet study, the vaccine offers limited—and even then quickly waning—protection against catching the virus and virtually no protection whatsoever against spreading it. Yet vaccine mandates and passports, in fact, facilitate disease transmission by granting vaccinated people a false sense of security, while subjecting unvaccinated people, including those with natural immunity, to unprecedented restrictions and punishment.
This is one of the truly dark aspects of the vaccine passport system: It threatens to rip asunder the tenuous threads that keep the social fabric in place. On one side of the divide, a small majority of people—in the case of Lithuania, 58 percent of adults as of early November 2021—are able to continue to more or less go about their daily existence, for the simple reason that they have taken a medical product that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. On the other side, a large minority are barred from participating in society at all, for the simple reason that they have decided not to take it.
In the UK, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that while the certificates may “in principle” help ease lockdown and travel restrictions, they will do so at the price of creating a “two-tier society whereby only certain groups are able to fully enjoy their rights.”8
Of course, those so-called “rights” are not rights at all; they are, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald put it, “state-granted privileges one earns through compliance with demands of political officials that one inject substances into one’s own body.” A right is something that is available to all and cannot be rescinded, such as the right to work, raise a family, or practice religion. It also includes freedom of speech and freedom of the press. A privilege, by contrast, can be given and taken away and is considered a special benefit or opportunity available only to certain people.
In an interview on US prime-time news, Dr. Leana Wen, a contributing columnist at the Washington Post and medical analyst at CNN, confirmed that through the Biden administration’s mandates, the United States was moving toward a system of privileges rather than rights: “We really need to make it clear that there are privileges associated with being an American, that if you wish to have these privileges, you need to get vaccinated.”
It’s a huge price to pay in return for negligible benefits. As even the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has warned, “vaccine-only certification may only have a very small direct impact on transmission” but at the risk of instituting “potential associated harms and inequalities that should be considered prior to implementation.”9
Those potential harms include not just excluding people from society or discriminating against them but also scapegoating and dehumanizing them—stripping them of their human qualities, personalities, and dignity. In the United States, public authorities pinned the blame for the summer wave of infections on the unvaccinated, despite growing evidence to the contrary. In Lithuania “principled COVID Pass opposition is caricatured as conspiracy-theorist, antivaxxer,” writes Lietuva. “Honest debate is dismissed. Mainstream leaders—politicians, officials, media, the educated elite—openly wish death upon opponents of the Pass ‘so we can finally end this pandemic.’”
In Italy, “both Prime Minister Mario Draghi and President Sergio Mattarella have accused unvaccinated people of ‘putting the lives of others at risk’ (a claim based on the assumption that the vaccinated aren’t contagious),” writes Italian journalist and documentary filmmaker Thomas Fazi.10 Members of the political, medical, and media establishment have also “publicly denounced the unvaccinated for being “rats,” “subhumans,” and “criminals,” who deserve to be “excluded from public life” and “from the national health service,” and even to “die like flies.”11
It is through constant repetition of untruths like these that many national governments have succeeded in promulgating the idea that not being vaccinated means you are a health risk to others while being vaccinated means you are not. In late December, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, Jeffrey Zients, told vaccinated people they had “done the right thing and we will get through this.” Seconds later, he issued a very different message to the millions of unvaccinated people: “You’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”12
The Israeli government’s rhetoric, parroted mindlessly by the media, has also grown increasingly threatening, notes journalist and children’s author Ziona Greenwald in her blogpost for the Times of Israel, “This Is How It Happens”:
Whether a leader or follower in this race to the bottom it’s hard to say, but there’s no doubt Israel has lost its moral compass.… None of this compares to what took place during the Holocaust. But the galloping evil afoot today could lead to even darker places if it is not called out. When an Israeli TV presenter remarks, “Lockdown the unvaccinated? We ought to put them in cages!” and everybody laughs, we are on dangerous ground. When schoolchildren are put in “cherem” by their classmates because their parents haven’t submitted them to a shot, we should all shudder.
Unfortunately, most people are in the throes of what satirist- commentator JP Sears describes as a double layer of denial: They’re in denial about being in denial. Fellow citizens (be they family members, onetime friends, neighbors, or co-workers) are being stripped of their basic human rights and dignity—not to mention jobs, education, health care, and the benefits due all tax-paying citizens—with the circle of those impacted growing larger as the designation “fully vaccinated” is redefined once and again. The bystanders, for now still the majority, reel off well-ingrained justifications and avoid any thoughts that might give rise to compunction. Nothing seems to open their eyes to what’s happening.13
The ultimate goal is to convince people who are vaccinated that people who are unvaccinated are not only dangerous but unclean, flawed, even subhuman. These include people who are not able to take the vaccine for health reasons such as the chronically ill, those with allergies to one or more of the vaccine components, those who have already suffered a severe reaction to a previous dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, the immune-compromised, children under five, and pregnant or lactating women.
The fact that this is happening in societies that are already deeply stratified, divided, and polarized makes it particularly dangerous. Of course, nobody benefits from the further entrenching of social divisions and animosity other than the political, cultural, and financial elite that are encouraging it.
This process usually begins with language. As noted by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeffrey Barg, writing in his “The Grammarian” column, by the summer of 2021 people had begun referring less to “vaccinated people” and more to “the unvaccinated.”
That subtle shift from adjective to noun—what nerds call nominalization—affects how vaccinated people view the unvaccinated, and how the unvaccinated view themselves. Its implications are deadly.…
[R]eferring to the unvaccinated is a subconscious dehumanization. It’s easier for vaccinated people to judge the unvaccinated than vaccine-resistant people. When that language shift happens, walls between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated harden.
But this shift also affects how the so-called unvaccinated view themselves. Referring to the unvaccinated as a group can make them feel, well, like part of a group. Nominalization of the unvaccinated takes a personal choice—the decision not to get a shot—and makes it seem like an innate characteristic. In a desire to be part of this tribe, unvaccinated becomes not just a choice someone made but a definition of who they are.14
Unvaccinated people are also reduced to derogatory insults and sound bites: COVIDiots, COVID deniers, conspiracy theorists. Even Queen Elizabeth has taken part, labeling anyone wary of taking an experimental vaccine “selfish.” The corporate media is also participating in the name-calling. One CNN headline denounced unvaccinated people as “variant factories.”15 An article in Salon.com said it is “okay to blame the unvaccinated,” since “they are robbing the rest us of our freedoms.”16 This could not be further from the truth: Freedoms are not freedoms if they are capriciously granted and taken away from citizens by the government. An article in USA Today encouraged readers to “shun the unvaccinated.”17 American writer Akilah Hughes tweeted to her hundreds of thousands of followers: “Petition to call antivaxxers ‘plague rats.’” This not only met with widespread approval but spawned other suggestions, such as “spread necks” and “rat lickers.”18
This use of offensive, derogatory language serves one main purpose: to dehumanize a subset of the population that has decided, in most cases for legitimate ethical, religious, or health reasons, not to take an experimental gene therapy whose long-term side effects are not yet known. Virtually no effort is made to understand or even discuss the legitimacy of these motivations.
History has taught us—or at least should have by now—that the dehumanization, or “othering,” of an entire group of people is never a good thing. Just about every authoritarian system that has existed has, at one time or another, resorted to scapegoating one or several vulnerable minorities, often with horrific consequences. The Soviet Union, particularly during Stalin’s reign of terror, targeted the so-called “enemy of the people,” a catch-all phrase for anybody deemed not quite Bolshevik enough. Millions ended up perishing in the gulags of Siberia. The Nazis singled out Jewish people, gypsies, those with disabilities, communists, socialists, and other political opponents for systematic persecution and, in many cases, death. But first they stripped them of the essential qualities that made them human in the eyes of others.
In his “Ten Stages of Genocide,” Professor Gregory H. Stanton, the founding president of Genocide Watch, a Washington-based NGO, presented a process of steps that lead to a final solution. Stanton placed dehumanization at number 4 in his 10 stages:
At this stage, hate propaganda in print, on hate radios, and in social media is used to vilify the victim group. It may even be incorporated into school textbooks. Indoctrination prepares the way for incitement. The majority group is taught to regard the other group as less than human, and even alien to their society. They are indoctrinated to believe that “We are better off without them.”19
This is not to say we are on the road to genocide but rather that dehumanizing the countless millions of people who have chosen not to relinquish their bodily autonomy risks setting society down a very dangerous path. As Hannah Arendt argues in her classic book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, an overriding impulse of Nazi ideology was to deprive its victims initially of their legal and civil rights and next of their existential rights, ultimately denying perceived enemies of “the right to have rights.”
In most countries the people bearing the brunt of the privations are the most vulnerable—the poor, the stateless, migrants, and refugees. They are among the last to receive vaccinations, assuming they are able to get them at all. Even individuals in communities with easy access to the vaccine may not be able to get it due to medical conditions, religious teachings, or restrictions that public health authorities put in place. People on the margins often have less trust in authorities and are less likely to believe government assurances about vaccine safety and efficacy than those in the more closeted classes.
In New York City, one of the first cities in the United States to issue a vaccine passport, more than 70 percent of Black Americans between the ages of 18 and 44 had not taken the vaccine as of late September 2021. As a result, they have been unable to access indoor dining, gyms, museums, theatres, and a host of other indoor activities.
Black Lives Matter activists accused the city’s leadership of racism in its vaccine requirements. Hawk Newsome, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, criticized the city authorities for “excluding a tremendous amount (sic) of Black New Yorkers, from engaging in everyday activities.”20
What has happened in New York is more or less replicated across state lines. Black and Hispanic people are less likely to have received a vaccine than their Asian or White counterparts. By late October 2021, 70 percent of Asians and 54 percent of Whites had been vaccinated compared to 52 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of Blacks, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).21
One reason why ethnic minority groups are less willing to take the vaccines is fear of adverse events. Even in mild cases, this can mean having to take one or two days off work. For many low-paid workers, this is not an option. They may lose their jobs, wages, or be demoted. In the case of a more severe adverse event, it could mean costly, and possibly ongoing, medical treatment.
“There’s a lot of reasons for [Black people] to mistrust institutions,” says Dr. Gary Bennett, a professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, Global Health, and Medicine at Duke University. “Tuskegee looms large in the minds of Black Americans.”22 In the Tuskegee Experiment, which ran from 1932 to 1972, 600 Black men in rural Alabama with syphilis were told they were receiving drugs to treat the disease but were actually given placebos while the researchers studied the effects of untreated syphilis. For 40 years the researchers tracked the course of the untreated disease while promising the research subjects free treatment, until a reporter finally exposed the scandal in 1972. Tuskegee was not the only experiment of its kind. In a trial funded by the US Department of Defense in the 1960s, Dr. Eugene Saenger, an Ohio radiologist credited with advancing medical knowledge on the effects of radiation on the human body, administered dangerously high levels of whole-body radiation to more than 90 poor, Black, uneducated patients with inoperable tumors. As the LA Times reported in its 2007 obituary for Saenger, “as many as 20 patients may have died as a result of the radiation and the majority suffered intense pain, persistent nausea, and a variety of other ill effects from the radiation.”23
Another celebrated American physician, James Marion Sims, conducted research on enslaved Black women. Widely considered the “father of gynecology,” the nineteenth-century physician developed a surgical technique to remedy vesicovaginal fistula, a common nineteenth-century complication of childbirth that caused urine leakage and constant pain. But he did so by experimenting on black slaves who could not possibly give their consent to the procedure since they did not own their own bodies. Sims did not even give his subjects anesthesia, since he believed that Black people didn’t experience pain as much as White people. Once he had perfected the operation, after four years of experimenting on dozens of subjects, he began performing it on White women, this time using anesthesia.24
Then there is the notorious case of Henrietta Lacks, whose story was recently serialized by HBO, based on the award-winning biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.25 Lacks was an African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 at the age of 31. During the course of her treatment, scientists at Johns Hopkins realized that her cancer cells reproduced at a much higher rate than most cells, meaning they could be kept alive long enough to allow more thorough examination. This made them hugely valuable for medical research. Those cells, taken without knowledge or consent from Lacks in 1951, became the first, and, for many years, the only human cell line able to reproduce indefinitely and have since been used in research around the world. Neither Lacks nor her family were compensated or benefited in any way.
Medical malfeasance scandals such as these partly explain why Black and Hispanic communities often distrust the medical establishment. But it’s not just about lack of trust. Many people have well-thought-out concerns about potential side effects, both short term and long term; the pharmaceutical industry’s capture of medicine regulators; the secrecy surrounding the vaccine contracts governments have signed with the vaccine manufacturers; the alleged fraud in Pfizer’s vaccine trial; as well as worries about the authoritarianism and loss of civil liberties and privacy that vaccine mandates and passports threaten to unleash.
Instead of acknowledging these concerns as legitimate, many politicians, public health authorities, corporate media, and scientists disparage or patronize those who express them. This, of course, only perpetuates a cycle of distrust.
“Shaming people is bad,” says Bennett. “Stigmatizing people will actually lead to the converse of what we expect.”
Ironically, many of the people doing the stigmatizing are White so-called “progressives” who speak the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion and profess to hold such values. They claim to care about equality, and yet their legacy, if they are not stopped, may well be the resurrection of racial segregation.
In late November 2021, the medical journal Lancet published an article by Dr. Günter Kampf, a widely published researcher at the University of Greifswald in Germany, lambasting public health authorities in both the United States and Europe for promulgating the idea that the unvaccinated are solely to blame for the continued existence of COVID-19 while “people who have been vaccinated are not relevant in the epidemiology of COVID-19:”
People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic. It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatising parts of the population for their skin colour or religion. I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatisation of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.26
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we lived in deeply unequal times. Income and wealth disparities within and between countries had been rising for decades, largely as a result of government and central bank policies.
Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, most central banks have pursued policies aimed at inflating the value of financial assets. This has been great news for the top 10 percent of the population who own most of the assets but terrible news for the bottom 50 percent who barely own any. For example, when a central bank inflates the housing market, as most have been doing for decades, high-net-worth individuals see their personal wealth bloom as their property portfolios gain in value. People in the bottom 50 percent of the population not only don’t benefit because they don’t own a home, they have to pay more in rent, leaving them with even less disposable income and even less possibility of owning their own home.
Central bank policies have also concentrated wealth in another way: by making debt exceptionally cheap for the extremely wealthy. As interest rates have fallen close to zero, or in the case of Europe and Japan below zero, the rich have been able to access debt almost free of charge while middle and lower classes have continued having to pay much higher levels of interest on their credit card debt and consumer loans. This huge disparity in the cost of debt has allowed wealthy individuals to buy up assets and large companies to buy up their smaller rivals at virtually no cost.
Central banks’ zero or (in the case of Europe and Japan) negative interest rate policies have also fueled inflation, as the former president of the Federal Reserve regional bank in Kansas, Thomas Hoenig, warned they would more than a decade ago. Hoenig ended up retiring from the Fed in late 2011. After that, a reputation crystalized around him as the man who got it wrong, as Christopher Leonard writes in the Politico article, “The Fed’s Doomsday Prophet Has a Dire Warning About Where We’re Headed”:
He is remembered as something like a cranky Old Testament prophet who warned incessantly, and incorrectly, about one thing: the threat of coming inflation.
But this version of history isn’t true. While Hoenig was concerned about inflation, that isn’t what solely what drove him to lodge his string of dissents. The historical record shows that Hoenig was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else. He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system.
On all of these points, Hoenig was correct. And on all of these points, he was ignored. We are now living in a world that Hoenig warned about.27
As returns on financial assets have exploded in recent decades, salaries have stagnated (except for CEOs and other white-collar executives, of course). A recent article in the journal American Affairs reported that $34 trillion of real equity wealth, in 2017 dollars, was created between 1989 and 2017. Just 25 percent of that new wealth creation was the result of economic growth. Nearly half of it (44 percent) was the result of a reallocation of corporate equity to shareholders at the expense of worker compensation.28
A similar trend has occurred across all Western economies. By 2019 the backlash had begun. Spontaneous protests erupted across the global north and the global south, from Paris to Beirut to Hong Kong to Santiago de Chile and to Bogota. Many governments were caught on the back foot. But then along came COVID-19 and the government-imposed lockdowns, which not only made it more difficult for workers to protest but have also supercharged the forces driving poverty and inequality around the world.
While hundreds of millions of workers lost their jobs and millions of small businesses went belly-up, large companies, financial institutions, and wealthy investors were bailed out by the central banks. Many of the small businesses that have survived have lost a large share of their customers and revenues.
Again, it was largely vulnerable populations that bore the brunt of the economic pain. A study in the UK found that Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) migrants were more likely to suffer job loss during the COVID-19 lockdown than UK-born White Brits. And even though White Brits were more likely to reduce their work hours during the pandemic than BAME migrants, they were less likely to experience income loss and increased financial hardship.29
As US journalist Alex Gutentag chronicled in her article “Revolt of the Essential Workers,” the lockdowns themselves have already created a two-tier society:
When “two weeks to flatten the curve” began, the workforce was split in two: Some were defined as “essential” workers, and others as “nonessential.” The “nonessential” ordered delivery from home while farmhands harvested crops, workers in meatpacking plants processed and packaged products, truckers shipped food across the country, cooks prepared dishes, Doordash “dashers” dropped off takeout on doorstops, and sanitation workers picked up the trash. This division allowed the professional class to be protected from exposure to the virus and set the stage for a two-tier society.30
Wealthy individuals and companies were not just protected from exposure to the virus; they were also insulated from the economic pain of the pandemic-induced lockdowns. As the 2020 financial crisis deepened, the Federal Reserve printed trillions of dollars to bail out investors in highly leveraged hedge funds and real estate investment trusts that were imploding. It rescued asset holders whose stocks were plunging, as well as speculators in some of the riskiest asset classes, such as junk bonds. The wealthier they were, the more they received. A similar playbook was used by major central banks all over the world.
Between the start of the pandemic, in March 2020, and October 2021 the four largest central banks—the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the People’s Bank of China, and the Bank of Japan—increased their combined balance sheets by a staggering $10 trillion, from around $20 trillion to $30.8 trillion. The European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve accounted for over three-quarters of the new money printing.31
To borrow from Dickens, these are the best of times (for a privileged few) and the worst of times (for most of the rest of us). The economic fallout of successive lockdowns has already plunged anywhere from 143 million to 163 million people into poverty worldwide. At the same time, tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft have posted record profits. Some of the world’s biggest banks are earning more than ever before as equity markets explode, aided by an upsurge in mergers and acquisitions and unprecedented monetary and fiscal support programs.32 As Gutentag notes, when lockdowns began, we were “all in this together,” except that just about every government and central bank policy since then has widened inequality, crippled the middle class, and further enriched the rich.
To compound matters, prices of essential goods, including food and energy, are soaring worldwide due to unprecedented central bank money printing, postlockdown pent-up demand, supply chain shocks, and worker shortages. In October, consumer price inflation in the United States reached a 30-year high of 6.2 percent. In the European Union it hit 4.4 percent in October, its highest level since 2008. In my own country of residence, Spain, it reached 6.7 percent in November, the fastest annual pace of inflation since 1989. In the Netherlands it reached a near-40-year high. In some large emerging economies, such as Brazil and Turkey, inflation is already in the double digits. Many of the poorest on the planet, having already suffered the carnage of 2020, are now witnessing another savage cutback in their standard of living.
Meanwhile, the greatest upward wealth transfer in modern history continues apace. In the United States the top 1 percent of earners now holds more wealth than the entire middle class, according to data from the Federal Reserve.33 The richest 10 percent now own 90 percent of stocks.
The widespread introduction of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports threaten to exacerbate this trend even further by creating a permanent underclass that is effectively banished from the formal economy. In the United States thousands of people are losing their jobs every day due to vaccine mandates for workers. When Italy’s government introduced its “no jab, no job” ruling, an estimated 3.8 million workers were suspended without pay in one day. Yet the story barely made the international news.
These workers have suffered great personal cost, yet many of them (including in vital strategic sectors, such as logistics, law enforcement, and the military) are refusing to be cowed. Thousands of US workers are taking industrial action on a whole host of issues, including vaccine passports. The biggest class struggle of our lives has begun. As Russell Brand, British comedian and social commentator, put it, “we are no longer talking about rich versus poor; we are talking about a tiny percentage versus basically everyone.”
Since the start of the pandemic, the Institute for Policy Studies has partnered with Americans for Tax Fairness to trace the rocketing growth of US billionaire wealth. By October 18, 2021, the combined wealth of the billionaire class had surged by 70 percent, or $2.1 trillion, during the pandemic. The billionaire class is now worth a staggering $5 trillion—roughly the same as the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s third largest economy, Japan. It’s not just the wealth of US billionaires that has grown; so have their numbers. In March of 2020, there were 614 Americans with 10-figure bank accounts. By October 2021, there were 745.
Even more alarming, the wealth of the top five billionaires—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and Google cofounder Larry Page—has grown even more quickly than the US billionaire class as a whole. Musk’s wealth grew by a staggering 750 percent between March 2020 and October 2021, from $24.6 billion to $209 billion. Bezos’ wealth grew by a more modest 70 percent, Gates’ by 35 percent, Ellison’s by 111 percent, and Page’s by 137 percent. Together, these five men are worth more than $750 billion.
It’s worth noting that all five of these billionaires minted their money in Silicon Valley, as did the next two on the list, Mark Zuckerberg (6th) and Sergey Brin (7th). Their net worth has skyrocketed, thanks largely to the breakneck digitization of the global economy facilitated by the COVID-19-induced lockdowns and other restrictions.34 It has also benefited from the huge bailouts and stimulus programs unleashed by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, which have massively increased the market capitalization of their companies. Now, these tech billionaires stand to reap even more dividends from the business opportunities opened up by the vaccine passports. One of them (Bill Gates) has even been working behind the scenes to facilitate their rollout.
The vaccine passports and mandates will allow the billionaire class not only to continue expanding their wealth but also to entrench their power and control over the rest of us. But as the next chapter will show, even the best-laid plans can go awry.