While Trudeau acknowledged that proof of a COVID-19 inoculation would not be out of place for travellers who already face similar requirements for other vaccines when embarking on international jaunts, he said a similar scheme for everyday activities in Canada raises “questions of equity.”
Exactly how is the Trudeau administrations vaccine distribution plan equitable?
Canada’s health minister Patty Hajdu said the government is “certainly working on the idea of vaccine passports” with its fellow G7 partners.
“I was on a call with my G7 health minister counterparts just a couple of weeks ago and that is a very live issue,” Hajdu explained last Sunday on CTV’s Question Period. “We’ll be coming back to Canadians as we understand more about the intentions of our counterparts internationally, and as we understand more about how that will unfold around the world,” she explained.
Nearly one in two employees in some nursing homes has still not completed their consent form for vaccination, according to the most recent data from the association that represents the province’s nursing homes.
The French government claims that the level of Covid-19 vaccine uptake among health care workers “is not acceptable” and warns that if vaccination rates don’t improve it could make the jab compulsory.
As vaccines are globally being rolled out, a few countries, including Bahrain, have already introduced certificates identifying vaccinated people and the European Union agreed to develop vaccine passports under pressure from tourism-dependent southern countries.
The certificate issued by China would have details about the holder’s COVID-19 vaccination information and coronavirus test results, the Department of Consular Affairs under China’s foreign ministry said on its website.
h/t Mauser98
Social media giant Twitter announced this week that it will begin labeling tweets that share “misleading information” about the coronavirus vaccine and will implement a strike system for repeat offenders of the “misinformation policy.”
Justin Trudeau once called the idea of a vaccine passport “divisive” but now the federal government says it’s a “live” issue between Canada and its G-7 allies. True North’s Andrew Lawton talks about this and how opposing lockdown has been characterized as a fringe position.
The approval of a fourth vaccine in Canada should not give Canadians the green light to hold off on getting inoculated in order to wait for other doses with higher efficacy rates, medical experts say.
That attitude will end up lengthening the time it takes to get the pandemic under control, said Dr. Peter Juni, scientific director of Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table.
“If people start to do that, they actually prevent Canadians from moving slowly back to normal,” he said.
From digital certificates to “health passports”, countries and airlines across the globe are hoping to relaunch travel by letting people prove their Covid-free status.
But with patchy vaccine access around the world and mounting concerns over data privacy, questions are swirling about how the measures will work in practice.
So, we’re almost a year into the “New Normal” (a/k/a “pathologized totalitarianism”) and things are still looking … well, pretty totalitarian.
Most of Western Europe is still in “lockdown,” or “under curfew,” or in some other state of “health emergency.” Police are fining and arresting people for “being outdoors without a valid reason.” Protest is still banned. Dissent is still censored. The official propaganda is relentless. Governments are ruling by edict, subjecting people to an ever-changing series of increasingly absurd restrictions of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life.
And now, the campaign to “vaccinate” the entirety of humanity against a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of the infected survive (and that has no real effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile) is being waged with literally religious fervor.
“Vaccine passports” (which are definitely creepy, but which bear no resemblance to Aryan Ancestry Certificates, or any other fascistic apartheid-type documents, so don’t even think about making such a comparison!) are in the pipeline in a number of countries. They have already been rolled out in Israel.
While Hajdu wouldn’t say if it’s an idea Canada is pushing for—requiring some form of proof of vaccination to travel to Canada—she said other nations and industry groups are looking into the kind of evidence or documentation that could be requested in order to travel internationally.
Canada is now an outlier in the global vaccination rollout. No other country in the world has delayed second doses up to four months, and there is no evidence yet on the long-term effect it could have on immunity to COVID-19.
Here:
Of the top 10 countries in the world on a doses per capita basis, six of them are using vaccines from Russia, China or India. Canada is 42nd in the world on a doses per capita basis according to Bloomberg News Service’s vaccine tracker. News reports and information from government websites show 16 of the countries ahead of Canada are using shots from one of those three countries.
While Western nations, including Canada, scramble to get doses for their citizens, the governments in Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi are shipping vaccine abroad to make new friends, even as their own national vaccination efforts lag behind the rest of the world.
This week, China’s ambassador to Canada, Cong Peiwu, said his country always planned to help the world.
(Sidebar: what a lying sack of crap.)
“China stated in the early stages that once vaccines were developed and deployed they will become a global public good, so we are just honouring our commitment to help people, especially in developing countries,” he said. “We know the virus knows no borders.” …
Guy Saint-Jacques, a senior fellow at the University of Alberta’s China Institute and a former Canadian ambassador to Beijing, said China is clearly using the vaccines to help its image.
“This is part of their efforts to burnish their reputation abroad because they know that it has been tarnished with all the mistakes they made handling the pandemic and also they want to contrast themselves with Western countries,” he said.
Canada will take its share of vaccine doses from the internationally funded COVAX initiative and will not give any doses to other countries until all Canadians are vaccinated, said Procurement Minister Anita Anand.
Vaccine passports aren’t coming: they’re already here. And while discriminating against people based on their vaccination status is bad enough: the implications are even worse.
A vaccine passport transforms all of society into a two-tier system, but the basis for it isn’t a needle, it’s a set of government guidelines that were based on identity politics or ‘equity’.
