AS 2021 DREW TO A CLOSE, the world seemed to be in an even darker place than it was a year prior. In the largest live medical experiment ever conducted, “miracle” vaccines were rolled out across the planet—at least, to those who can afford them—and injected into the arms of billions of people. By the end of 2021, it had become clear they are not nearly as effective or as safe as we’d been led to believe. There are now far more daily cases of COVID-19 than at any other time in the pandemic.
Even the most ardent supporters of the new, non-sterilizing vaccine technologies admit that the vaccines do not prevent transmission of the virus. They are incredibly leaky against the Delta variant and even more so against Omicron. “Especially with Omicron, where we don’t see virtually any difference, there is a very narrow gap between people vaccinated and non-vaccinated, both can get infected with a virus, more or less at the same pace,” said Professor Cyrille Cohen, head of Immunology at Bar-Ilan University and a member of the advisory committee for vaccines for the Israeli Government.1
In Denmark, the public health authorities, which have generally done a good job of tracking COVID-19 case numbers as well as the emergence and spread of new variants, reported in late December 2021 that 89.7 percent of the 17,800 Danes who had contracted Omicron by December 15 had been vaccinated two or three times. Only 8.5 percent were unvaccinated. By contrast, the unvaccinated accounted for 23.7 percent of the people who had contracted Delta or other variants. This is in a country where just under 80 percent of the population had received two vaccines and 35 percent had received a booster. It is a similar story in the UK where cases per 100,000 were higher in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated, according to the government’s vaccine report of January 13, 2022.
These findings suggest that Omicron is not only completely evading the vaccines but may even infect the vaccinated more than the unvaccinated. Put simply, this is a vaccine that is falling part. On January 11, 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that Omicron represented “a new west-to-east tidal wave” that could end up infecting more than half of the population living in Europe—the world’s most vaccinated continent—within the next two months. In Europe, some governments were calling for the COVID-19 virus to be reclassified as endemic, meaning that it is here to stay but is no longer considered a public health emergency. One of the reasons for this is that public health agencies have essentially lost control of the virus’ spread. In my country of residence, Spain, cases had soared so high that the country’s diagnostic labs could not keep up with the demand for tests, as El País reported on January 17.2
The only silver lining on offer was that Omicron appeared to be less virulent than other dominant variants. At the time of writing this, it is too early to tell with total confidence just how true that is. We probably won’t know until the virus begins infecting large numbers of elderly patients in countries with old populations. If Omicron does turn out to be a lot milder than previous dominant variants, then perhaps, just perhaps, it means we are beginning to finally turn the corner of this global health crisis. But we should still be wary. Given its extreme contagiousness, Omicron still has the potential to overwhelm our heavily weakened hospital and primary care systems. Omicron also appears to be generating more symptomatic cases among young children, which is a major cause for concern. And while it doesn’t target the respiratory system like previous variants, there are unsettling signs that it may be hitting other organs proportionally harder than other variants. There are also likely to be more variants in the pipeline, one or more of which could end up being more virulent than Omicron.
Yet even as more and more governments call for a reduction of quarantine times, which is almost certain to increase the risk of contagion, the end of testing and a loosening of mask mandates, they continue to double down on the vaccine mandates and ratchet up the vaccine passport requirements. Almost every country in Europe, Australasia, and North America, from France to Germany, to Australia and New Zealand, to Canada and Belgium, to Spain and Italy, called an abrupt end to decades—or in some cases, centuries—of liberal democracy. In its place they have adopted a new form of governance in which basic rights are trampled in the name of bringing a virus under control, with a substandard medical therapy that delivers no such promise.
The ultimate goal, it seems, is to set up a global biosecurity state. On December 1, the WHO announced plans to kickstart a process “to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.”3 Once again, the European Union appears to be playing a key role in pushing for this “global pandemic treaty.”4
Given how badly most governments have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and how poorly states have coordinated their containment efforts, there is an argument to be made for establishing pandemic control processes and standards at a global level. However, a centralized global pandemic response under the auspices of an organization like the WHO will mean that health authorities will be even less answerable to local populations. One thing that is clear is that the WHO, in its current form, is not the body to do it.
The organization has already done a shoddy enough job of combatting the current pandemic. For example, it failed to recognize that the COVID-19 virus was an airborne disease until far too late. It also fought, at every step, to discourage national health authorities from using cheap, off-patent medicines such as ivermectin in the early treatment of COVID-19 patients. Both of these failings have cost an untold number of lives. The WHO is also heavily conflicted by the donations it receives from private companies, many in the pharmaceutical industry, and private trusts, such as the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, both at the forefront of efforts to push global digital identity on the world’s population. Those donations now account for 80 percent of the organization’s funding.5
In other words, if the WHO took full control of all future responses to global pandemics, it would represent yet another corporate takeover of government functions—this time at a global level. Additionally, the World Economic Forum now holds a huge amount of sway over the United Nations following a strategic partnership agreement in 2019 (see chapter 6). Unless stopped in its tracks, the construction of a global biosecurity state could pave the way to a neo-feudal system of global government whereby a tiny fraction of the global population owns and controls everything and global corporations call the shots. The rest of us will own nothing, have no privacy, no control over our own bodies, and have little choice but to do what we are told because our every action will be connected to our digital identity.
Even before COVID, we were already quite far along this path. For decades Wall Street and the City of London had made an artform of “extract[ing] rents through market-based forms of daylight robbery”, as the economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis pointed out in a 2020 article, “Techno Feudalism Is Taking Over.” Since the financial crisis of 2008, two further developments have intensified this shift: First, the global economy began to be “powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit,” says Varoufakis. At the same time, value extraction “increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.”6
The recent creation of biosecurity states across the former liberal West promises to turbocharge this shift toward tech-enabled neo-feudalism. In most countries in Europe, you now need to take a COVID-19 vaccine every few months to be allowed to do even the most basic of things, from going to work to eating in a restaurant, to shopping in the local mall, to even seeing your general practitioner. In Germany and Austria, the unvaccinated are under virtual house arrest. In Italy, they can’t work or attend baptisms, communions, and weddings. They can’t even ride the bus or metro and everyone over 50 now faces mandatory vaccination. In many countries, anyone who refuses the booster shot, even after suffering a severe adverse reaction from a prior shot, is fated to join the burgeoning ranks of the unvaccinated, the new global class of untouchables.
Many of the world’s wealthiest have massively expanded their wealth and power in the last two years, largely on the back of central bank money printing. As Varoufakis says, “all over the West, central banks print money that financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their shares (whose prices have decoupled from profits).” The closer you are to the money spigot, the easier it is to expand your wealth. All the while, small, independent businesses that were functioning perfectly well before the pandemic but were forced to take on debt just to weather last year’s lockdowns are collapsing as economic conditions deteriorate.
Many of the world’s poorest are finding it hard even to feed themselves, thanks in part to surging food inflation. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the region hardest hit by the pandemic, the number of people facing extreme hunger rose by 13.8 million in 2020 alone, to 60 million people. That’s roughly 10 percent of the region’s population. A staggering 267 million people—almost half the population—grappled with food insecurity in 2020.7 Something people in advanced economies tend to forget or simply are not aware of is that every time a lockdown occurs in the Global North, struggling economies in the Global South feel the effects even more keenly, as demand for their raw materials, assembled goods or tourism destinations collapses.
We cannot say we were not warned. As the Germany-based playwright, author, and satirist C. J. Hopkins notes, the global political, financial, and business elite telegraphed all of this to us during the first lockdowns of March 2020; most of us were just too disoriented and shell-shocked to listen:
They informed us in unmistakable terms that our lives were about to change, forever. They branded and advertised this change as “the New Normal,” in case we were … you know, cognitively challenged. They did not hide it. They wanted us to understand exactly what was coming, a global-capitalist version of totalitarianism, in which we will all be happy little fascist “consumers” showing each other our “compliance certificates” in order to be allowed to live our lives.8
But there is still cause for optimism. All around the world, pockets of resistance are forming at the same time that overall public faith in the COVID-19 vaccines appears to be falling. As governments slide further and further into authoritarianism, demanding ever more stringent compliance from their respective populations, that resistance is growing. And it is taking many forms, from legal challenges in the courts, to campaigns to encourage the use of cash, to consumer boycotts, to huge—and growing—popular demonstrations in towns and cities all over the world. More and more people, it seems, are waking from their slumber.
On November 30, 2021, Namur’s Court of First Instance, in the Wallonia region of Belgium, ruled that the country’s vaccine passport—the so-called “COVID Safe Ticket” (CST)—was illegal. According to the ruling, government legislation requiring all citizens to show their CST before entering cafés, restaurants, gyms, and cultural venues represented a disproportionate curb on individual freedoms that does not even serve the goal they are ostensibly intended for: to control the transmission of COVID-19.
The court also warned that the CST may contravene European law as well as the right to the protection of personal data. The judges ruled that the region “must take all the measures it deems appropriate to put an end to this situation of apparent inequality resulting from the use of CST in the Walloon region.”9 If the Walloon Government didn’t do so within seven days of the judgement, it would be subject to a fine of €5,000 for every day it continues to enforce the use of the CST.
Wallonia’s regional government announced it would appeal the decision. And on January 7, 2022, the Liège court of appeal ruled in its favor, declaring that while the CST does indeed infringe on the freedoms of every Belgian, it is a “necessary, objective and proportional” instrument needed to contain the COVID-19 epidemic.10
The case was brought by a nonprofit organization called Notre Bon Droit (“Our Good Right”), which describes itself as an “alliance of health professionals, scientists, lawyers and Belgian citizens who believe that the government’s response to COVID-19 is misguided and not based on the best scientific evidence available.” The collective was founded by three Belgian citizens: Isabelle Duchateau, a nurse who says she is “particularly concerned” about respect for patients’ rights as well as “fair and uncorrupted” medical and scientific information; Stella André, a jurist of European law, who fears the rule of law and fundamental rights and freedoms “have been undermined since the beginning of the virus crisis”; and lastly, Benoit Clarembeau, a father of three children who says he is “anxious to assure them a future in a state of law.”11
Notre Bon Droit is also contesting the legality of vaccine passports in France and has presented a similar case against the CST in Brussels. If the case produces the same initial result as in Namur, it will mean that a court in the EU’s capital, where the Green Pass was first conceived, will have ruled that vaccine passports are illegal. As of early January, no ruling had been made.
These developments offer a glimmer of hope in a continent gone dark. But it is still only the faintest of glimmers. Even judicial obstructions to the vaccine passport can be quickly overturned, as the people of Spain learned in the late summer of 2021.
In August, the regional high court of Andalusia, in Southern Spain, ruled against the use of COVID passports to restrict access to public spaces. When the case reached Spain’s Supreme Court, in mid-August, the court ratified the decision, becoming the first judicial authority in Europe to rule against the use of COVID passports to restrict access to public spaces.12 But the ruling lasted only a month. On September 14, following a request from the regional government of Galicia, the Supreme Court decided that vaccine passports were, after all, a “suitable, necessary and proportionate” measure to prevent new infections in regions at high risk of contagion. By early December, eight of Spain’s seventeen regions had made the certificate a condition of entry to certain spaces, including bars, restaurants, and hospitals.13
The lesson is clear: No one city, region or even nation can single- handedly stop vaccine passports from becoming a reality. But if enough people in enough countries mount a concerted campaign of opposition across all levels of society, anything is possible.
Time is of the essence, however. By the end of 2021, just about every nation in Europe had passed legislation making vaccine passports a precondition for entry to public places, including one of the last holdouts, England. On December 15, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons, one of the world’s oldest parliaments, passed the Boris Johnson government’s “Plan B” legislation for England, which included the introduction of vaccine passports for nightclubs and large venues.14 In the process, the Johnson government suffered its biggest backbench rebellion to date, but it was still able to pass the legislation, thanks to the support of the increasingly supine Labour Party.15
The legislation cleared the chamber despite the fact that vaccine passports clearly do not work, especially against a COVID-19 variant like Omicron that so easily evades the vaccines. What’s more, mandatory COVID Passes contradict the advice of the UK Parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) report into COVID-19 status certification, which concluded that the government could not make a solid scientific case in support of vaccine passports, and that they would be discriminatory.16
In the months preceding the vote, friends and family members in the UK told me, with characteristic British pride, that the hugely discriminatory policies and practices taking place across mainland Europe would never be allowed in a country as traditionally liberal and democratic as the UK. They were wrong, but only to an extent. On January 19, Boris Johnson took the world by surprise—or at least the world outside the UK—when he announced plans to lift almost all of the “Plan B” measures for England, including the COVID-19 certificate. In so doing it became the first so-called “liberal democracy” to emphatically reject the need for mandatory domestic COVID-19 status certification.
“The end of Covid passes in England is a MONUMENTAL victory for civil liberties & equality,” wrote Silkie Carlo, director of the British civil liberties NGO Big Brother Watch. “What separates us from much of the covid-ID-managed West is the principled courage of every Brit who stood up when it mattered, against the odds, & our uniquely strong civil society.”17
The policy U-turn was an act of political desperation by a government brought to its knees by an endless succession of corruption scandals. After so many of Boris Johnson’s cabinet ministers as well as Johnson himself had been caught flouting their own COVID-19 rules and then lying about it, there was only one way for the Government to stay standing: to get rid of the rules. But it’s touch and go whether it will be enough. As I am writing this, the media campaign against Johnson is intensifying, pretenders to the throne are sharpening their knives, and former cabinet ministers are calling on the PM to resign. By the time this book is published, Johnson could already be out of office. If so, his replacement could very quickly reverse policy once again and resurrect the restrictions. Alternatively, they might get rid of the restrictions Johnson left in place, such as the vaccine mandate for all NHS staff. For the moment, there is no way of knowing which way the wind will blow. As has been the case since the Brexit referendum of 2016, the UK is in a highly fluid situation.
In the EU, meanwhile, the vaccine passports and mandates are encroaching inexorably into just about every facet of the economy and society. In the same week the UK dropped its “Plan B” restrictions, Austrian lawmakers approved Europe’s first near-universal coronavirus vaccine mandate and Italy’s government issued an edict banning people without the vaccine certificate from all retail premises except supermarkets, pharmacies, opticians, pet shops, and gas stations. With each new encroachment, the governments of Europe, with the European Commission leading the charge, drive the final nail deeper into the coffin of liberal democracy. Much the same is happening in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of the United States. If we allow this to happen, we will go down in history as the generation that oversaw the end of liberty—and did nothing about it. When, in the future, our children and grandchildren ask us how democracy died, we will be able to borrow these words from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (on how bankruptcies unfold): “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
None of this would have been possible without the assistance of the legacy media. One of the darkest, most Orwellian devices deployed by today’s army of propagandists is the claim that people opposed to vaccine passports are depriving the rest of society of their freedoms. A perfect example of this was provided by veteran British journalist Andrew Neil who, on December 9, 2021, just days before the UK government’s vaccine passport bill passed through parliament, published an article in the Daily Mail titled: “It’s Time to Punish Britain’s Five Million Vaccine Refuseniks: They Put Us All at Risk of More Restrictions. So Why Shouldn’t We Curb Some of Their Freedoms?” In the article, Neil wrote:
As long as they can be numbered in the millions, the nation will remain unnecessarily vulnerable to the latest variant, meaning more lockdowns, more restrictions on our lives, more lost jobs, more failing business, less economic growth—all of which will follow the Government’s introduction of its so-called Plan B of enhanced restrictions this week.…
Under Plan B, vaccine passports will be required for entry to nightclubs and at major gatherings at large venues. It would not be difficult to extend them, French-style, to other public places, including restaurants, pubs and bars, and non-essential shops (even the unvaxxed need food and medicines!).
It would give those of us who’ve done the right thing more protection and for those who’ve not, pause for thought.18
Like many celebrities and high-ranking media figures, Neil paints vaccine passports as “a minor inconvenience,” especially when “a new wave of the coronavirus pandemic is sweeping across the continent.” What he doesn’t mention is that Europe is already far and away the most vaccinated continent on the planet. It also has more vaccine passports per person than any other region.
Given that the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines is nonsterilizing and incredibly leaky, particularly against the Omicron variant, everyone in Europe, the UK included, could be forcefully vaccinated and the continent would still be vulnerable to the latest variant. Gibraltar—the most vaccinated place in the world— cancelled Christmas due to a surge in COVID cases. The entire eligible population of Gibraltar is vaccinated.
This is where the entire basis of Neil’s argument collapses: The vaccine passports are not helping countries combat transmission of the virus and may actually be exacerbating it. How else to explain the fact that by the end of 2021 the EU, whose 27 Member States had been using vaccine passports to one degree or another for almost half a year, was once again ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic?
Besides preparing the psychological ground for acceptance of the vaccine passport, the scapegoating of the unvaccinated serves another agenda: to shift the blame for the further ratcheting of restrictions, loss of freedoms, and the inevitable economic fallout that will follow from those who are truly responsible—the government; public health agencies; organizations such as the WHO, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the corporations they represent—to the unvaccinated.
The ultimate goal is to transform the fear and frustration festering in people’s psyches into anger and hatred for the “other,” while deflecting attention away from those who are really driving this process. It is a perfect example of divide and conquer, and the stakes could not be higher.
This is the battle of our lives, for our lives. The world as we know it is crossing the Rubicon, and on the other side lies a dark, bleak future of unfettered government and corporate surveillance and control. If governments are able to complete the construction of the biosecurity state, they will have at their disposal unprecedented tools to shape, mold, and control the population. They will be able to decide exactly what new experimental gene therapy goes into our bodies and when. They will have the capacity to control just about every aspect of human behavior, expression, and thought while also tracking our every movement.
Anyone who tries to resist will be easily identified and tracked down. This is a vital point: In other times of tyranny, there was always the possibility for opponents of the regime to run, hide, and regroup, albeit at huge risk. In tomorrow’s biosecurity state that will not be possible. In other words, if we fail to act now, it will be virtually impossible to act in the future.
We don’t just risk losing our privacy and basic rights and freedoms, which generations of our forebears have fought so hard to attain—we risk losing our collective soul. As has happened so many times during the darkest episodes of history, the voices of power—often through mouthpieces in the legacy media—are urging people to see the “other” (in this case the unvaccinated) as the “enemy.” Resentment is also rising among the unvaccinated towards the vaccinated.
The authorities want to pit one side against the other, but we must try to resist falling into this trap. Do not let fear turn to hate. Remember: Both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are your friends and neighbors, your brothers and sisters. They are your mothers and fathers, your sons and daughters. They are your doctors and nurses, your teachers and students.
History has taught us, time and again, that any government that preaches hatred toward one group of people is always happy to shift the focus of that hatred to another group whenever it suits them. In circumstances such as this, when your government is committing evil, passivity is not an option; it just encourages more. As the Romanian-born American writer, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once wrote, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
One of the ironies of today’s world is that most people comply in order to make the restrictions, privations, and crackdowns end, but their compliance means they never do. The good news is that more and more people are beginning to realize this, and not a moment too soon. Throughout Europe, the United States, Australia, and far beyond, small acts of resistance are taking place. The shopkeeper who insists on continuing to serve his unvaccinated customers despite the threat of government fines. The cinema owner who refuses to close her doors to unvaccinated film lovers. The doctor who continues to treat unvaccinated patients, despite government rules forbidding him from doing so.
Mass protest movements are also multiplying. By mid-December cities across France had witnessed twenty-two consecutive weekends of protest against the Macron government’s COVID pass rules. The demonstrations have even extended to France’s overseas territories. In late November, French authorities were forced to dispatch police reinforcements to Guadeloupe and impose a curfew on the Caribbean island after a week of “quasi-insurrectional arrest.”19 But the French government did postpone imposing a vaccine mandate on the island. It is a salutary lesson: The only way to stop governments from imposing more and more draconian restrictions on our lives is to stop complying with them—but to do so without resorting to violence.
In the Czech Republic, widespread demonstrations prompted the new center-right government to scrap a decree making COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for essential workers and those over 60. As Reuters reported on January 19, the new Czech Government took the step in order to avoid “deepening fissures” in society. The decree had also failed to stop cases from reaching a new record high.20
Some cities in Italy have been rocked by so many demonstrations that the local authorities have resorted to banning them altogether, with the explicit support of Mario Draghi’s technocratic government. On December 11, tens of thousands of people marched in Vienna in protest against the government’s new COVID-19 restrictions, including home confinement orders for the unvaccinated and mandatory COVID-19 vaccines. A week later, protests took place in more than a dozen towns and cities, including Vienna, Innsbruck, Gmünd, and Leibnitz. Cities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Croatia have also seen big protests.21 In some countries in Eastern Europe, such as Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria, the majority of people, many of whom remember what life was like under communist rule, are still unvaccinated. It will be interesting to see how they react if the EU tries to force the vaccination on them.
Germany, the EU’s most populous country and biggest economy, has seen wave after wave of demonstrations since the federal government announced plans, on November 30, 2021, to enforce mandatory vaccination. The German journalist Paul Schreyer, writing in the online news website Multipolar Magazin on December 17, likened the blossoming protest movement to the massive mobilizations of autumn 1989, which helped bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall:
Independent of each other and without central planning, weekly protests have been organized across numerous cities in a very short space of times. Over 50 German cities have been involved since last weekend: 8,000 demonstrators recently gathered in Hamburg, 3,000 each in Munich, Fürth, Magdeburg, Rostock and Cottbus, and 2,000 in Nuremberg, Reutlingen, Neumarkt, Freiburg, Aschaffenburg, Schweinfurt and Mannheim. In numerous other cities, the protests have grown to four-digit numbers in the past few days—in many cases, [the number of participants] has doubled compared to the previous week.
Since the beginning of December, demonstrations have been taking place in German cities on an unprecedented scale against the corona policy and the planned mandatory vaccination. The number of protesters grows from week to week. A nationwide, decentralized movement is emerging. Local citizen committees, which are engaging in dialogue with elected city representatives at roundtables, could make the protest even more effective. At the moment, however, there is also a threat of escalation due to covertly staged acts of violence.
Currently, an average of 0.5 to 2 percent of residents are demonstrating in the cities affected by the protest. According to the continuously updated, representative COSMO study by the University of Erfurt in cooperation with the Robert Koch Institute, as of December 3, 2021, 15 percent of the citizens surveyed are “willing to take part in a demonstration against the restrictive measures.” (PDF, p. 23) There is still considerable potential for the demonstrations to grow in size.22
There are also parallels with the tumultuous events of 1968. Some of those in the present demonstrations will be so-called “Achtundsechzige,” former student protesters in 1968 who tried in vain to prevent the passing of the Emergency Powers Bill. The protests centered on the concern that the emergency law could give the government extraordinary powers. A combination of no effective opposition within parliament and waves of protest in neighboring countries (e.g., in France, where riots almost led to the toppling of the government in May 1968) fueled the debate across the country.
Though the protests could be viewed as specifically German, with a younger generation railing against the Nazi past of their parents’ generation, the target was the perceived authoritarianism of a government being handed back emergency powers by the Allied Control Council. Despite its reputation as a law-abiding, orderly society, post-war Germany is no stranger to protest when its people fear its government is overstepping the mark. That is precisely what is happening today.
On January 3, 2022, an estimated 1,390 towns and cities took part in what was dubbed “a Monday walk,” in direct defiance of the government’s latest lockdown orders, according to the organizers’ Telegram channel. The protest movement bears echoes of the Monday demonstrations that took place against the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in towns and cities across East Germany between 1989 and 1991.23
“The government is concerned about the decentralized actions,” reported Die Welt. “Against the NATO build-up, the Iraq war or greenhouse gas emissions, far larger protest marches have already formed than are currently taking place against the Corona policy. But never before in the history of the Federal Republic have there been demonstrations that are more widespread than in the last few weeks.”24
As the movement grows, the government, with the help of the legacy media, both in Germany and abroad, is trying to demonize all protesters. One popular strategy, already trialed in Italy and France, is to paint them all with the broad brush of neo-Nazism, which in Germany has a particularly powerful effect. In the subheading of its December 14 article, “Anti-Corona Protests Escalate, Riots in Several German Cities,” the Jerusalem Post reported that “anti-vaccination activists and right-wing extremists are merging into a homogeneous mass”:
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser lamented an increasing propensity to violence and radicalization at demonstrations against the Corona measures. “The propensity to violence is increasing,” Faeser stated on her Twitter account:
“Many lateral thinkers are becoming more radical. Threats and intimidation are completely unacceptable! We must step up efforts for social cohesion and overcome the attempts at division by anti-democratic forces.”25
Although it is true that far-right groups have played a role in Germany’s antivaccine passport movement, to portray everyone who opposes the government’s increasingly draconian policies as extremist is absurd, especially given that roughly one out of every four adults is still unvaccinated. It is also farcical to hear the Minister of Interior of a government that has imposed Europe’s second “lockdown of the unvaccinated” talk about the need for social cohesion. Given the increasing number and size of the protests sweeping Germany, it seems that more and more people are seeing through it. According to Schreyer, the government’s strategy of smearing the protests in a bid to prevent them from reaching a critical mass appears to be failing:
The legacy media have lost too much trust … for their reporting to penetrate effectively. In the absence of alternatives, attempts are still being made to demonize and marginalize the demonstrators as dangerous, confused people or right-wing extremists. Almost no comment from federal and state politicians on the protests comes without the words “radicalized” and “violence.” This seems all the stranger as the demonstrations have so far been predominantly peaceful.
One of the main tools the protesters have used to organize demonstrations and to share information is the Telegram messaging service. But in mid-January the German government threatened to ban the service altogether if it continued to be used in this way. “We cannot rule this out,” said Faeser. “A shutdown would be grave and clearly a last resort. All other options must be exhausted first.” As The Independent reported at the time, “Germany is not alone in potentially seeking controls on Telegram. Bans and regulations exist in a variety of countries, from China to India and Russia”—three countries that are not exactly famed for their respect for freedom of speech.26 But this, alas, is the direction in which we appear to be heading in Europe.
Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who took over from Angela Merkel in November 2021, has responded to the burgeoning protest movement with tougher and tougher language.
“We must counter threats with all severity. I want to keep the country together. And so, I am also the chancellor of the unvaccinated,” he said in mid-December. The last sentence was hardly comforting given that days earlier Scholz had said: “For my government there are no more red lines in everything that has to be done. There is nothing we can rule out.”27
While Germany’s new president was feigning concern for the unvaccinated, the prime minister of France, Jean Castex, had a surprise of his own up his sleeve. As of mid-February 2022, negative test results would no longer suffice for anyone over 16 to qualify for the “pass sanitaire,” which would essentially become a “pass vaccinal.” Unless you are fully vaccinated, which according to the new rules will mean taking a booster shot within four months of your last shot, or you can prove you have had an infection in the past four months if you are over 18 (down from six months), you will not be able to access most public spaces.
With the new rules, France will become the first (but presumably not the last) EU Member State to completely abandon negative PCR test results in its vaccine passport legislation as well as shorten the length of time infection-acquired immunity buys you. Germany has also reduced the validity of the recovery certificates from six to three months and is urging the EU to do the same in its Green Pass legislation.28 The fact this is happening while evidence continues to mount that the protection provided by naturally acquired immunity is both broader and longer-lasting than vaccine-derived immunity is yet more proof that these draconian measures have little to do with public health.
“We intend to put the pressure on the unvaccinated,” said Castex, as if they hadn’t been doing just that for the preceding five months.29 A few weeks later, French President Emmanuel Macron stoked divisions even further by pledging to “piss off the unvaccinated” (emmerder les non-vaccinés), whom he apparently blames for France’s record COVID-19 case numbers.30 The abrupt rewriting of the rules, to turn the screws even tighter on the country’s millions of unvaccinated citizens, should serve as a wake-up call for all French citizens who have the slightest regard for liberté, fraternité, and egalité—precious little of which will remain in the digital dystopia being rushed into existence.
Here’s an interesting paradox: The country that produced most of the companies and technologies that are facilitating the march toward a digital dictatorship, the United States of America, could also end up being the last bastion of freedom. There are three main reasons for this: First, the constitutional checks and balances embedded within the US system of governance make it much harder to bulldoze into law legislation that threatens basic rights and liberties, as has happened in the EU. Second, the tensions between state rights and federal power have limited the federal government’s ability to impose nationwide vaccine mandates. And third, individual liberty is far and away the most cherished political principle in the country, for better or worse, and one that is explicitly protected by the country’s constitution.
Unlike in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, vaccine mandates or passports have not been implemented across the board, despite the best efforts of the Biden administration. On November 4, 2021, the Biden administration ordered federal contractors, employees of businesses with 100 employees or more, and certain health care employees to show proof of full COVID-19 vaccination, or get weekly COVID-19 testing, by January 4, 2022. But as recent developments in the country have shown, it is a lot easier to draw up a vaccine mandate than it is to enforce it.31
The mandates got strong pushback straight away. Entire sections of COVID-19 vaccine requirements have been temporarily blocked, as lawsuits challenging the mandates have proliferated. On November 12, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to “take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.” This effectively put on hold COVID-19 vaccination and testing requirements for companies with 100 employees or more, which affects around 84 million US workers.
Biden’s executive order requiring contractors to ensure their workers are vaccinated against COVID and enforcing mask and social distancing policies has also met stiff opposition. So, too, has the mandate for health care workers to get vaccinated. Some of the court-imposed restrictions on the mandates had been lifted by the end of 2021, but the final decision will probably lie with the judges of the country’s most powerful court. As the attorney, legal scholar, writer, commentator, and legal analyst Jonathan Turley notes, “all of these mandates are on course for a showdown in the Supreme Court where three (of the nine) justices have already expressed skepticism over the mandates:”
On October 29, 2021, three Supreme Court justices dissented in a case where they felt review should have been granted. Justices Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito raised questions over whether past deference on the pandemic is warranted and warned that the “compelling interest” recognized in such past cases “cannot qualify as such forever.”
Over the last year, courts have remained highly deferential. However, the three justices previously noted that “if human nature and history teach us anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”32
As the impasse continues, the legal disparities among states and municipalities continue to grow. In November 2021, a federal court in Louisiana blocked President Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers. As a result, many hospitals suspended their vaccine requirements, to ease severe labor shortages, while others left them in place. As the Wall Street Journal noted, thousands of nurses have left the industry or lost their jobs rather than get vaccinated:
As of September, 30 percent of workers at more than 2,000 hospitals across the country surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were unvaccinated.
“It’s been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the health care industry are willing to go and shop around,” said Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer and head of consulting firm Mercer’s US regulatory practice. “If you get certain health care facilities that don’t require it, those could be a magnet for those people who don’t want the vaccine. They’ll probably have an easier time attracting labor.”33
To add to the chaos, on December 15, 2021, the New Orleans–based US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a nationwide ban against the federal government’s vaccine mandate for health care workers, leaving it in place only in the 14 states that had collectively sued in federal court, in Louisiana and 10 other states where the mandate was blocked by a separate November 29 ruling. As a result, many of the hospitals in the 26 states where the mandate was reinstated that had dropped their vaccine requirements would now have to reinstate them, unless of course another injunction was granted. On January 14, the U.S. Supreme weighed in on the matter, temporarily blocking the OSHA rule and upholding the vaccine mandates for most healthcare workers.
Another irony is that three of the United States’ most important weaknesses when it came to mounting a united, coordinated response to the pandemic—its decentralized system of government, the abject incompetence and corruption of its public health agencies, and its disjointed, largely private, for-profit health care system—are now preventing it from hurtling headlong into a biomedical dictatorship. Unlike Brussels, Washington cannot order the 50 states of the Union to adopt vaccine mandates—at least not yet!
That is likely to get even harder as more and more evidence emerges confirming the vaccines’ even lower efficacy at preventing transmission of the Omicron variant. As Biden himself conceded in the final week of 2021, “there is no federal solution to the pandemic.”34 Of course, there could have been a federal solution, but it would have required more honest public messaging, better preparedness, and a broader strategy involving more measures than just vaccine mandates and scapegoating of the unvaccinated. There is also little sign of Washington being able to develop and impose a centralized vaccine passport system for the whole country, at least not without sparking civil war.
And that is a good thing. It has spared large swathes of the country the dark, discriminatory, dangerous policies that are radically reconfiguring societies across Europe and other parts of the globe. That said, many parts of the United States have installed vaccine passport systems and mandates, albeit at a local or state level.
In some places, the measures adopted are at least on par with those in Europe. On December 6, 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio demanded that all children aged 5 to 11 show proof of vaccination to access “public indoor activities.” Yet despite all of its vaccine mandates and vaccine passport system, New York was still struggling to contain the virus at the end of 2021. The state has one of the highest vaccination rates among the most populous states in the United States but between early December and early January was registering single-day records for positive COVID cases almost every day.35
Almost all of the vaccine passport mandates and vaccine systems being rolled out in the United States are in Democratic states, where the governing class and its voters pride themselves on their devotion to diversity, tolerance, and social justice. That same governing class, in its obeisance to corporate power, is installing a new system of discrimination and segregation that, if not stopped, will prove to be far more efficient at excluding second-class citizens from society than even the racial segregation policies of the past century.
Yet many Democratic supporters look on and applaud, or at least nod their heads in quiet approval. As the British author Paul Kingsnorth notes, COVID has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times:
In the last month alone, I have watched media commentators calling for censorship of their political opponents, philosophy professors justifying mass internment, and human rights lobby groups remaining silent about “vaccine passports.” I have watched much of the political Left transition openly into the authoritarian movement it probably always was, and countless “liberals” campaigning against liberty. As freedom after freedom has been taken away, I have watched intellectual after intellectual justify it all.36
It is time to say “Basta ya!” (enough already). This is not about whether you have been vaccinated or not, or how many times you have been vaccinated. It is about whether you are willing to give up all agency over your own life for a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission.
This is a one-time deal we are (not really) being offered. For the vast majority of us who make up the lower and middle strata of the economic and social classes, it is a rotten deal. We are being told to give up virtually everything that matters—our freedom to associate with whomever we choose, to move around (not just from country to country but within our own countries and, if recent developments in Italy are any indication, within our own cities), to express ourselves freely, to inform and think for ourselves, to protest government corruption, abuse, or overreach, to decide for ourselves what experimental medical products go into our bodies, to work—in return for virtually nothing.
For governments and national security agencies, the benefits of the digital dictatorship are clear: expanded power and control at a time when economic conditions are about to get unimaginably worse for the vast majority of the population. For big tech companies, it will create new opportunities to amass even more data over our lives, which they will then be able to transform into even more revenues and profits. For big pharma, the biosecurity state provides the perfect business model. Vaccine mandates ensure continuous demand for the products they produce, no matter how substandard or unsafe they may be.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic Moderna was close to collapse as safety concerns and other reservations about its mRNA delivery system imperiled its entire product pipeline. As of mid-January 2022, its share price was worth more than five times its value in March 2020 despite having fallen 65 percent from a record high it registered in September 2021. During a panel discussion organized by the World Economic Forum in January 2022, CEO Stéphane Bancel said his company is now working on a combined booster vaccination for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV.37 In the same week, Bill Gates issued yet another warning that the world was facing pandemics even more dangerous than COVID-19 and called on governments to invest yet more money in the vaccine technologies in which he, through his foundation, is heavily invested.38 In the meantime, we ignore most other key areas of public health policy, including early outpatient treatment, ventilation, and preventive health measures. As my colleague at the economic and finance blog Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith, wrote in her article, “Covid: The Narrative Is Crumbling,” the United States “should be ashamed that third world countries are doing better by sending diagnosis and treatment kits to citizens, with care packs including thermometers, blood oximeters, test kits, zinc, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, OTC meds for fever, and sometimes the I drug.”39
For the vast majority of the world’s population, this deal does not offer any real benefits, just drawbacks, privations, and punishments, which is probably why we are not being consulted on or even informed of its terms and conditions. Yet the governments of ostensibly democratic nations still need the tacit consent of the majority, even as they try to snuff out what remains of our basic rights and freedoms.
Before it is too late, which will be sooner rather than later, we need to ask ourselves one simple question: Where is my red line? For many people, their red line is the mass vaccination of healthy children, who are at less risk from the virus than adults and whose young bodies will needlessly be exposed to the risk of the as-yet unknown long-term side effects of the vaccines.
Where is yours? Forced vaccination? A booster shot every two or three months? Unfettered surveillance? Indefinite detention for those who disobey? Total censorship of social media? Digital checkpoints everywhere you go? All for upholding the use of leaky vaccines that don’t even protect against transmission of the Delta variant and which appear to be even leakier against Omicron.
Wherever your red line may be, the chances are that by the time it is crossed, it will already be too late to mount a resistance. Day by day, hour by hour, the digital control grid is tightening around us while our democratically elected governments are carrying out a wholesale bonfire of our basic rights and freedoms.
But there is still a brief window of time in which the populations of the world’s liberal democracies—vaccinated and unvaccinated—can unite to stop this madness from becoming permanent, turn back the clock, and reclaim agency over our lives. Enough is enough!