Are you ready to get your passport?
You may soon need one — to go to the movies or to a bar.
I’m not talking about the kind you renew at FedEx Office.
I’m speaking of your COVID card.
As reported by West Palm Beach’s CBS12, before doing a host of regular-American things, you may soon be required to flash your medical credentials in the form of a vaccine passport.
The proposed ID might be mandatory for access to a theater complex, a concert venue, a restaurant, or a mall.
And, of course, a plane.
From WPEC:
Governments, airlines, employers, universities, and many other businesses are intensely debating how best to review verified health records during the pandemic to monitor the spread and promote vaccinations.
With the vaccine passport, your COVID-19 records may soon function as an actual passport. Think of arriving at the airport, pulling out your smartphone and scanning a digital record of your vaccination or negative test.
Ron Russo — owner of Vacation Superstore Network, Vogue Vacations, and Best Price Cruises — knows all too well how the coronavirus has slowed the world.
Over the course of the year, the travel industry’s been crippled.
Ron’s lament:
“Nine months of our income was completely wiped out. It will be difficult for travel agencies to even break even in 2021.”
As packing up and going is picking up and growing, he explained the vaccine passport’s now in the works.
And you’ll need to play ball, particularly if you’re a globe trotter:
“Many countries are going to put in at least for some time some kind of vaccination requirement.”
CBS12 relays the passport may involve a QR code which reveals one’s COVID history.
Several airlines are purportedly already on board, Jet Blue and United among them.
Your passport could be stored on your phone. If not, you could carry a smart card.
Seem like a smart plan?
It raises, of course, a sizable question: What’s gonna happen if (when?) everyone’s told they have to take the vaccine, but not all are sure about the shot?
Consider a December 9th article from The Associated Press:
“AP Poll: Only Half of Americans Want Coronavirus Vaccine”
In October, RedState’s Michael Thau shared info that might give folks further pause:
Did you know that 2 leading vaccine contenders use a never-before-approved technology to genetically alter your cells so they start making COVID proteins?
Sorry, of course not. Totally forgot you don't matter.
Just role up your sleeve and get in line peasant. pic.twitter.com/7fWEuH42vp— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) October 9, 2020
It's beyond reprehensible that this is being pushed on us for a virus that – even ignoring the ridiculously loose criteria used to count its fatalities – is no more deadly than the flu even on official W.H.O figures. https://t.co/8Uxd4Z8BKB pic.twitter.com/TRMeQIiYkM
— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) October 9, 2020
Some may also consider Michael’s piece which announces, “Flu Vaccine Fail: CDC Stats Say Effectiveness as Low as 10%!”
Are you all-in for immediate injection?
RedState’s streiff isn’t.
As made clear Wednesday, he’s taking a “wait and see” approach:
“[F]or my part, I’m going to wait at least two or three years before taking the vaccine to see how many of my…countrymen suffer from what kinds of side effects.”
I suspect that’ll be a popular position for quite some time.
If so, it’s just one more element of upheaval 2021 may soon deliver.
Back to Michael:
[An alarming article by a professor of law from Stanford University] brazenly outlined a scheme to deprive anyone refusing the impending COVID-19 vaccine of their liberty and right to work without running afoul of any “legal challenges on procedural due-process grounds” – or, as they probably like to call it at Standford’s law school, ‘that pesky Fifth Amendment.’
But even putting aside any right you may have to decide which drugs get injected into your body, it’s hard to say whether the idea of forcing us to get vaccinated for COVID-19 is more frightening or nonsensical.
Either way, a passport may be coming — for every port you want to pass: at the borders of what used to be all the places everyone could freely go.
-ALEX
See more pieces from me:
2020 in a Nutshell: New York Sees a Series of Assaults by Vicious Squirrels
Find all my RedState work here.
And please follow Alex Parker on Twitter and Facebook.
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