Gates, GAVI And The Global Digital ID System

Digital Surveillance Coming

Michael Nevradakis

COVID-19 may have caught much of the planet by surprise in late 2019 and early 2020, but much of the groundwork for the technology now widely used as a “response” to the pandemic was conceptualized and developed years prior.

In the U.S. and throughout the world, there has been a recent push to implement a variety of “vaccine passport” regimes, many of which rely on digital technologies such as mobile applications to carry a record of — so far, at least — one’s COVID-19 vaccination records.

These “tools” are presented by public officials and significant sections of the media in recent weeks and months as an inevitability of sorts, a technological progression as natural as breathing.

They are also presented as a “new” response to an unprecedented crisis.

These technological applications are touted as a means of keeping businesses open and ensuring “peace of mind” for members of the public who remain wary about entering public spaces.

But just how new is this “new” technology? And will the use of technology be limited to COVID vaccinations, or for purposes of “health?”

It was the beginning of the preceding decade, January 2010, when Bill Gates, via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, proclaimed “[w]e must make this the decade of vaccines,” adding that “innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before.”

In launching this so-called “Decade of Vaccines,” the Gates Foundation pledged $10 billion in funding. But Gates wasn’t the only actor behind this initiative.

For instance, the “Decade of Vaccines” program used a model originating from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to project the potential impact of vaccines on childhood deaths throughout the decade to come.

And the announcement for the “Decade of Vaccines” initiative was made at that year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

These same actors — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the WEF — organized the now-notorious Event 201 pandemic simulation exercise, in October 2019, just before COVID entered our lives.

Moreover, in 2010, a “Global Vaccine Action Plan” was announced as part of this initiative. It was a collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with Dr. Anthony Fauci serving on the leadership council.

As the Gates Foundation stated at the time:

“The Global Vaccine Action Plan will enable greater coordination across all stakeholder groups — national governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, the private sector and philanthropic organizations — and will identify critical policy, resource and other gaps that must be addressed to realize the life-saving potential of vaccines.”

The steering committee for the “Global Vaccine Action Plan” included a member from the GAVI Alliance. Notably, the initial announcement for the “Decade of Vaccines” was made in the presence of Julian Lob-Levyt, then-CEO of the GAVI Alliance.

What, or who, is the GAVI Alliance? Also known as the “Vaccine Alliance,” it proclaims a mission to “save lives and protect people’s health,” and states it “helps vaccinate almost half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases.”

GAVI goes on to describe its core partnership with various international organizations, including names that are by now familiar: the WHO, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank. (Far from helping the world’s poor, the World Bank has been described by a former insider, John Perkins, as an organization that uses “economic hit men” to subjugate financially crippled countries).

In 2018, GAVI, through its INFUSE (innovation for update, scale and equity in immunization) Initiative, put forth the following “food for thought”:

“Imagine a future in which all children have access to life-saving vaccines no matter where they live — a future in which parents and health workers ensure their timely vaccination, a future in which they have their own digitally stored health record that cannot be lost or stolen, a future in which, regardless of gender, economic or social standing, this record allows each child (and parents) to have access to a bank account, go to school, access services and ultimately build a prosperous life.

“This future is possible today. With the latest advances in digital technologies that enable more effective ways to register, identify births and issue proof of identity and authentication for access to services — we are on the brink of building a healthier and more prosperous future for the world’s most vulnerable children.”

This would be accomplished, according to GAVI, through the INFUSE initiative, specifically by “calling for innovations that leverage new technologies to modernize the process of identifying and registering the children who are most in need of life-saving vaccines.”

As described by investigative reporter Leo Hohmann:

“Don’t be confused by the bit about ‘building a healthier and more prosperous future.’ That’s just window dressing. This is all about data collection and has nothing to do with health.

“The real purpose behind the historic, unprecedented push to vaccinate the very young, even against diseases like COVID that do not pose a threat to them, is to fold the current generation of children into the blossoming global digital identity system.”

GAVI itself confirmed the above statement, as it has described potential uses of these “new technologies” as going beyond the issuance of a “digital child health card” toward encompassing “access to other services,” including the broadly defined “financial services.”

Limitations on “access” to such “other services” are already apparent in jurisdictions where COVID passports restrict access to businesses, banks and other private spaces for the non-vaccinated

The GAVI Alliance also closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, founded in 2016, which claims to advocate in favor of “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID,” adding that “doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties.

Unsurprisingly, there is no clarification provided regarding the potential loss of civil liberties for individuals who choose, for any reason, not to be vaccinated and who are therefore excluded from large swaths of society in areas where COVID passports have been implemented and enforced.