While each of Beveridge’s “Five Giants” — want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness — remains unslain, one in particular retains the power to cripple entire nations with the stroke of a pen. The past three years have revealed many things, the most disturbing being the extent to which Beveridge’s notion of public health has been perverted. Not only is the NHS falling short of its original aim of providing free and adequate healthcare for all, but, as something meant to liberate human beings from the threat of disease, public health is slowly being transformed into an instrument of social control.
As new authentication and surveillance technologies, such as vaccine passports and track-and-trace apps, were rolled out during the pandemic, civil rights organisations and activists raised the question of mission creep — that is, the likelihood of governments clinging on to these technologies and using them for unanticipated ends, heralding a new era of normalised state surveillance.
Even the United Nations warned that the potential for abuse was high and that “what is justified during an emergency now may become normalised once the crisis has passed”. Some went even further, claiming that the pandemic was being deliberately exploited by global elites to usher in a “great reset” of human societies — a shift towards an increasingly propertyless, cashless, ultra-digitalised economy. At the time, such concerns were dismissed as groundless conspiracy theories. And yet, like so many other claims that were initially ridiculed and censored only to be proven correct over time, events are corroborating many of these fears.
Following the recent G20 meeting in Bali, the leaders of the world’s largest economies issued a joint declarationthat, among other things, called for the establishment of a global vaccine passport and digital health ID scheme. The statement reads: “We acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods, under the framework of the IHR (2005), to facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognising digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations.”
The International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005 are a legally binding agreement of 196 countries developed under the auspices of the World Health Organization.
The IHR, which entered into force in 2007, required countries to strengthen surveillance capacities at border crossings and introduced a series of health documents, including international certificates of vaccination.
The G20 leaders further stated: “We support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks as part of the efforts to strengthen prevention and response to future pandemics, that should capitalise and build on the success of the existing standards and digital Covid-19 certificates.”
During the Business 20 (B20) panel held ahead of the G20 summit, Indonesia’s Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin made the same recommendation in even starker terms: “Let’s have a digital health certificate acknowledged by WHO — if you have been vaccinated or tested properly, then you can move around.”
In a 132-page document that contains a series of recommendations for the G20, the B20 urged the widespread adoption of digital Covid-19 certificates that would be part of a “technology-enabled ‘always-on’ global health infrastructure”.
Sadikin added that G20 countries have agreed to the proposal and now plan to introduce it as a revision to the IHR framework at the next World Health Assembly, scheduled for May 2023 in Geneva.
The idea is that the WHO should be given legally binding powers to implement such measures in the future. This is an attempt to revamp the WHO’s so-called international pandemic treaty — an effort to give it sweeping powersto dictate public health measures to countries with the full backing of international law, potentially overriding their national sovereignty.
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