Category: Health & Medicine

Military Documents About Gain of Function Contradict Fauci Testimony Under Oath

  • Military documents state that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018 seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the gain of function research moratorium.
  • The main report regarding the EcoHealth Alliance proposal leaked on the internet a couple of months ago, it has remained unverified until now. Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.
  • “The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research,” a direct quote from the DARPA rejection letter.
  • Project Veritas reached out to DARPA for comment regarding the hidden documents and spoke with the Chief of Communications, Jared Adams, who said, “It doesn’t sound normal to me,” when asked about the way the documents were buried.

Project Veritas has obtained startling never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this. Continue reading “”

I think they’re just shilling for more ‘boosters’.

Pfizer CEO: 2 shots ‘offer very limited protection, if any’
Admits mRNA vaccines don’t have ‘the safety profile that we hoped’ for

BLUF:
Sotomayor [might as well add Breyer in as well, ed] may not make a blunder as obvious as this one again, but the thought process—or lack thereof—that led to it will not change.

At Minimum, Sotomayor Should Recuse Herself From All Decisions Regarding COVID.

Sonia Sotomayor’s ludicrous claim before her Supreme Court peers during oral arguments that one hundred thousand children were “in serious condition” from COVID-19 when three thousand would have been more accurate, is far more than just an embarrassment to the justice.
How could such an ill-informed person be a justice of our highest court? What else doesn’t she know—or, perhaps more exactly, doesn’t want to know?
Her full quotation makes it sound still worse.
“We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, many on ventilators.”
None of those are true. We are currently going through a bump in cases of the vastly weaker Omicron variant, which many have compared to a cold and in the vast majority of instances can be treated at home with therapeutics.
Even extreme vaccine enthusiast CDC director Rochelle Wallensky admitted that hospitalizations for other age groups were fifteen fold greater than the pediatric—and those weren’t much.
Sotomayor wasn’t alone on the court with her what some might euphemistically call “mischaracterization.” Justice Stephen Breyer claimed “750 million new cases” of coronavirus had been reported in our country when the entire population is well less than half that.
Can you get two cases of COVID-19 at once? Who’d a thunk it?
What’s going on here? Are the two Supreme Court justices taking stupid pills? Is the “Wise Latina” not so wise after all?
She may not be a legal genius but that’s not the problem. The problem is what I have called “want-to-believe.”
Sotomayor and Breyer are so convinced of liberal/conservative ideology that they are unable even to see the arguments of the other side, sometimes to the extent that they do not even know they are there, that they exist.
This is even true when the arguments are about science, not politics—when facts, not opinions, are most important.

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BLUF:
In the end, this is just more evidence of how political the entire pandemic has been. Everything’s a conspiracy theory until it’s no longer useful to the Democrat narrative. Then, and only then, can changes be made to present the public with more accurate information.

The CDC Just Confirmed Something That’s Been Called a Conspiracy Theory for Nearly Two Years

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a debate over the accuracy of the COVID-19 death totals has existed, with the attempt being to delineate who died directly from the virus vs. who died while having an incidental infection.

That debate emerged because there have been numerous examples of people wrongly labeled as dying of the coronavirus when they clearly died by other means and would have done so regardless of infection. Typically, when a limited dive into the data produces such results (such as just looking at Palm Beach County), you can bet there are a lot more examples out there that just haven’t been discovered.

Yet, for the better part of two years, any discussion of such miscategorizations resulted in a litany of derogatory responses. Either you were a conspiracy theorist, weren’t taking the pandemic seriously, or both. The press wrote countless articles insisting that the totals were completely accurate, especially during the Trump administration. The Washington Post even managed to call Sen. Joni Ernst, who is about as milquetoast of a Republican as you can get, a conspiracy theorist for asking questions. Meanwhile, social media companies would ban people for suggesting the totals were inaccurate.

But as has been the pattern the last few months, from the admission that the lab leak theory is probable to revisions about the vaccines not stopping the spread of COVID-19, another major shift is taking place. Per CDC Dir. Rochelle Walensky, the government is preparing to release revised COVID death figures that will show those who died from the virus instead of the broader total of those who died with it.

When taken in a vacuum, this announcement is a very good thing. Who wouldn’t want more accurate data regarding the pandemic? Especially when our inflated COVID death numbers are used to disparage the United States worldwide while other countries undercount their death totals.

Yet, I can’t help but notice how politically convenient this is. Literally, just a few days after Joe Biden took the mantle of presiding over the most COVID deaths from Donald Trump, the government suddenly decides now is the time to revise the numbers? Yeah, there’s no way that’s a coincidence. And rest assured, the same media that “fact-checked” any prior questions about the COVID death totals will now pretend like that never happened.

Imagine if the CDC under Trump had moved to compile such data? It would have caused a firestorm of accusations that the government was falsifying the death totals for political gain. Heck, it wouldn’t have surprised me if it led to another impeachment. Yet, the Biden administration moves to do just that and it’s all shrugs.

In the end, this is just more evidence of how political the entire pandemic has been. Everything’s a conspiracy theory until it’s no longer useful to the Democrat narrative. Then, and only then, can changes be made to present the public with more accurate information.

FDA Issues Guidance Prioritizing People for Monoclonal Antibodies Based on Their Race

Guidance from the Food and Drug Administration says that some people may be considered “high risk” based on their race and will be prioritized for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals used to treat COVID-19.

The agency issued a fact sheet for healthcare providers, which was updated in December, notifying them that it had approved emergency use authorizations of sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody proven effective against omicron. However, the antibodies are only approved for patients considered to be “high risk.”

“Medical conditions or factors” such as “race or ethnicity” may “place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19,” the guidance reads, adding that the “authorization of sotrovimab under the EUA is not limited to the medical conditions or factors” outlined by the agency.

Older age, obesity, pregnancy, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are listed as some of the medical conditions and factors that would make a person “high risk.”

Similarly, New York state’s Health Department last week revealed its plans to distribute COVID treatments like monoclonal antibody treatment and antiviral pills. The plan states that a person must have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness” to be eligible for the treatment.

One “risk factor” included in the plan is being a person of color due to “longstanding systemic health and social inequities.”

“Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19,” the memo reads.

Instead of ‘Turtles all the way down‘, it’s going to be ‘Injections‘.
And as I understand it, the vaxx companies get about $30 per dose.
Do some simple arithmetic on that number related to population.

Moderna CEO Says Fourth Vaccine Dose May Be Needed Next Fall

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said Thursday that individuals may need a fourth shot of the Wuhan coronavirus vaccine, CNBC reported.

Bancel reportedly made the remarks while speaking with Goldman Sachs at a health care CEO conference. In the discussion, he noted that the efficacy of booster shots will decline over time. Because of this, he said those who received a booster dose this past fall will likely need another come fall 2022.

“Bancel said people who received their boosters last fall will likely have enough protection to get them through the winter, when new infections surge as people gather indoors to escape the cold.

However, Bancel said the efficacy of boosters will probably decline over the course of several months, similar to what happened with the first two doses. The Moderna chief was interviewed by Goldman Sachs during the investment bank’s health-care CEO conference.

‘I will be surprised when we get that data in the coming weeks that it’s holding nicely over time — I would expect that it’s not going to hold great,’ Bancel said, referring to the strength of the booster shots.”

Bancel added in the discussion that governments in the United Kingdom and South Korea have already ordered doses in preparation.

CNBC noted that a study published by the U.K. Health Security Agency found that booster doses are up to 75 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections two weeks after receiving the shot. However, the efficacy of the booster shot begins to decline after roughly four weeks.

“I still believe we’re going to need boosters in the fall of ’22 and forward,” Bancel said in the interview. He mentioned that a mutation of the virus could change the course of the pandemic again.

“We have been saying that we believe first this virus is not going away,” he added. “We’re going to have to live with it.”

Not that having a deep intellect – or any brains at all for that matter – is a requirement to be seated on the court.

Today’s deep question: Will Twitter suspend Sotomayor for COVID misinformation?

A wise axiom warns us not to deduce Supreme Court decisions based on the questions asked by its justices during oral arguments. Perhaps, however, we can deduce their relative wisdom and grasp of reality from the questions they pose. In today’s debate over the legality of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates imposed by OSHA, a few of the justices appear to have little grasp of the current facts of the pandemic.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor led the way on misinformation. Sotomayor was hardly alone in causing jaws to drop, but she was the clear leader. The transcript isn’t yet available, but observers shared their amazement on Twitter. First, Sotomayor misses the rationale for a mask mandate entirely:

Ahem. COVID-19 is a respiratory illness. If it were a blood-borne disease, no one would need to wear a mask, and there would be little need for a vaccine mandate in workplaces. That’s rather basic to the question of whether OSHA’s vaccine/mask mandate serves a rational purpose for a legitimate state interest.

That, however, was only the start of the nonsense. Here are more of Sotomayor’s bon mots……………….

 

Up to date?
Boooooosters for life!

Who Saw This Coming? The New Term for ‘Fully Vaccinated’ Has Arrived

With booster shots being increasingly pushed and many institutions now requiring them, the term “fully vaccinated” is being replaced, according to White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“We’re using the terminology now ‘keeping your vaccinations up to date,’ rather than what ‘fully vaccinated’ means,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Tuesday. “Right now, optimal protection is with a third shot of an mRNA or a second shot of a J&J.”

The comments come after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the Pfizer-BioNTech booster shot five months after the two-dose series, which is one month earlier than previously recommended. For the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the agency has not changed its recommendation for when to get a booster—six months and two months after the initial series, respectively.

“As we have done throughout the pandemic, we will continue to update our recommendations to ensure the best possible protection for the American people,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement. “Following the FDA’s authorizations, today’s recommendations ensure people are able to get a boost of protection in the face of Omicron and increasing cases across the country…”

Much like the definition of ‘fully vaccinated,’ government officials have also changed the way vaccine mandates are discussed, preferring to use “requirements” instead.

“Mandates—that’s a radioactive word. Requirements—people seem to respond better to that,” Fauci told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last month. “They work. We are never going to get out of this outbreak if we still have 50 million people who for reasons that are still very, very difficult to understand refuse to get vaccinated when you have a virus that’s killed 800,000 Americans and caused 50 million infections so if people still do not want to get vaccinated sometimes you have to for the common good make requirements.”

The misinformation from the CDC keep on coming
I could spend all day, every day, dissecting the garbage that gets published by the CDC. This paper was a doozy. Fortunately, I get by with a little help from my friends.

Sometimes, the crap coming out of the CDC is too egregious to ignore and litigation is required to fix it.

This is one such case. And credit goes to Del Bigtree, ICAN, and Aaron Siri for both doing the analysis and threatening legal action if they don’t withdraw the paper. This is what I meant in the headline about getting by “with a little help from my friends.”

The paper in question can be found on the CDC website: Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19 Among Adults Hospitalized with COVID-19–Like Illness with Infection-Induced or mRNA Vaccine-Induced SARS-CoV-2 Immunity — Nine States, January–September 2021

The claim: you are 5.49X more likely to be infected if you are unvaccinated but had a previous COVID infection compared to a vaccinated person.

This claim is preposterous.

It is well established in many papers that previous infection is way way better than vaccination. Also, the previously infected don’t spread the virus, unlike the vaccinated. So natural infection is also preferred to vaccination.

This paper is contrived to mislead the public into believing vaccination provides better protection than natural infection. It doesn’t.

You always have to be suspicious when there are only 9 states. Were they cherry picked to give the results that they want? Nah, only a conspiracy theorist would make that kind of assertion!

Have you ever seen the CDC publish a paper that was counter-narrative? It does happen (rarely).

You may be surprised that this does in fact happen! However, it is rare and the press never seems to notice it. Here’s a rare example that you can read before they notice their mistake and remove it (excerpted from my earlier article “Do masks work?”).

Clinical trials consistently find that masks don’t protect people from respiratory viruses. Here is what a multi-year study on masks versus viruses said (it is published on the CDC website):

“We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”

I bet you weren’t aware of that paper. It is well concealed.

The full analysis of the CDC paper comparing recovered immunity vs. vaccine immunity

Here’s the full analysis for your reading pleasure.

It makes you wonder if there is a book available at the CDC employee bookstore, only for CDC employees, entitled “50 ways to skew a study to achieve the results management wants.”

Fauci Finally Admits COVID Data Is Garbage

For two years, Americans have been told to “trust the science” and listen to “the data” on hospitalization and death from Wuhan coronavirus. They were told these were the best metrics to use when planning risk, how to move forward with their lives and that the government was using the numbers to determine a “safe” amount of personal freedom they could allocate to the masses. This data was also used to scare parents into complying with hardcore lockdowns of schools under demands from politically motivated teachers’ unions.

During the summer, just as schools were supposed to reimplement in-person learning and reopen for the fall semester, media outlets around the country reported children were being hospitalized for Wuhan coronavirus. Headlines blared about concerning spikes in hospitalizations for the disease and health officials cited in reports demanded new restrictions and unproven vaccinations for children.

But it turns out those headlines were false, and the data doesn’t reflect a crisis.

“One important thing. If you look at the children that are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID. And what we mean by that, if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID, and they get counted as a COVID hospitalized individual when they may, in fact, go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s over counting the number of children who are ‘hospitalized with COVID’ as opposed to because of COVID,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told MSNBC during an interview this week.

With COVID as opposed to because of COVID. Precisely.

Finally, Fauci admits what many have known to be true. Those who made this point before Fauci’s admission were called conspiracy theorists and banned for stating these facts on Twitter. Cases of the virus were and are being counted regardless of patient status and whether individuals were in the hospital for the disease or another issue. The over counting isn’t limited to children; it applies to every person admitted to the hospital since the pandemic began in early 2020. The tainted numbers have also made their way into death counts, not just hospital admissions.

In December 2020, a Colorado coroner essentially blew the whistle on death counts from the disease by revealing that people who had died of gunshot wounds were counted as Wuhan coronavirus deaths.

“The Grand County, Colorado coroner is calling attention to the way the state health department is classifying some deaths. The coroner, Brenda Bock, says two of their five deaths related to COVID-19 were people who died of gunshot wounds,” KMOV4 reported at the time. “‘These two people had tested positive for COVID but that’s not what killed them,’ she said. ‘The gunshot wound killed them.'”

For two years, the death and hospitalization rate data being used by government health officials at the local and federal levels have been completely contaminated. Regardless, it’s been cited as justification for business closures, to halt “non-essential” medical procedures, to shut down schools, limit events and much more. The lives of Americans have been turned upside down, and their freedoms have been limited based on egregiously bad data.

With Fauci’s atypically truthful admission, the question now becomes whether government bureaucrats will work to detangle and detach deaths or hospitalizations with the virus from deaths or hospitalizations caused by the virus? Or will they continue to use the trashed data to uphold their emergency powers to bolster never-ending control over the lives of Americans? Sadly, we already know the answer.

Texas AG gains federal injunction against another Biden vaccine mandate
Federal ruling halts COVID-19 protocol conditions for funding Head Start programs

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton scored what he considered to be a “win for the children of Texas” after a federal judge ruled against vaccine and mask mandates for Head Start programs initiated by the Biden administration.

The ruling from Judge James “Wesley” Hendrix of the U.S. District Court Northern District of Texas orders a halt in required COVID-19 protocol conditions for the funding of Head Start programs.

The new rules issued last month require children over 2 in Head Start programs to wear masks, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is requiring staff, contractors and volunteers in the program to be vaccinated by the end of January.

 

So once it became clear that covid was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following:

1. Cloth masks are ineffective against omicron (Leanna Wen, CNN);
2. The vaccinated can spread and get covid;
3. The death rate is comparable to the flu (Chris Hayes);
4. Many people are entering hospitals with covid, not from covid (Fauci);
5. Natural immunity is a reason omicron hasn’t been as virulent (Fauci);
6. We have to take into account societal needs, not just spread prevention (CDC);
7. The asymptomatic should not be tested (NFL);
8. We should focus on hospitalizations and deaths, not case rate (Biden);
9. Children are not at risk and schools should remain open;
10. Covid is predominantly an illness affecting the immunocompromised and elderly and we should not shut down society.

Those of us in reality have been saying all this for months and most of it since May 2020. But your political priors were more important than the data. You had to have your demonization narrative.
So welcome to reality. And f*** all y’all for pretending you didn’t know this so you could have fun crapping on Trump and DeSantis and all your red state relatives.
And btw, AOC and all you Leftist covid fanatics — those whose virtue signaling authoritarian lockdown nonsense that has resulted in millions of lives destroyed — stay in your states and leave mine alone.
We chose data and freedom. You chose alarmism and unearned moral superiority. Stay in NY, NJ, CA, and the rest — and enjoy the actual paranoid nanny state you created among your friends who reward you for telling them they will kill their kids and grandma if they don’t panic.
Oh yes, and Happy New Year to all.

Comment O’ The Day
“The ‘noble lie’. These clowns are undermining faith in the health care system for a generation…… Idiots.”

Almost like a naturally occurring vaccine?

Study shows people infected with Omicron may be less susceptible to Delta variant

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in South Africa has found evidence that suggests people who have been infected with the COVID-19 Omicron variant may be less susceptible to infection from the Delta variant. The team has written a paper describing their work.

As the global pandemic has progressed, variants have emerged—some more resilient than others. Thus far, the Delta variant has proven to be the hardiest and because of that has overtaken the original virus as the most widespread of the variants infecting people around the world. More recently, the Omicron variant has emerged, first in South Africa, then all around the world. Initial reports indicate that the new variant is much more easily spread than Delta but is less harmful to those infected—also, there has been some evidence that the booster shots given for the original and Delta variants may last for as little as ten weeks against Omicron. In this new effort, the researchers in South Africa have found some evidence of Omicron infections giving people some degree of immunity from Delta infections.

The work by the  in South Africa involved testing 15 people who had been infected with the Omicron variant—some of whom had been vaccinated and some of whom had not—to see how well their immune systems would respond to a Delta infection. They found they had all developed some degree of enhanced immunity to the Delta variant. The researchers then tested the  from the same 15 people two weeks later to see how well they put up a fight against both Omicron and Delta. In so doing, they saw a 14-fold increase in ability to overcome Omicron and a 4.4-fold increase in an ability to overcome Delta.

The researchers note that 11 of the patients had been vaccinated (and two were excluded) and that there was a good chance that most or all of them had been infected with either the original version of the virus or the Delta variant—thus it is not clear what was behind the increased resistance to Delta. They note that much more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be drawn about the impact of Omicron on resistance to Delta.

Year-End Musings on COVID, Science, and Chainsaws

COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.

The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It’s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.

I’m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.

I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”

Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.

Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.

Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”

The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show their children sufficient love—a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim’s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one’s own peril.

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.

Vax Passports: The Panzer Tank of the COVID-19 Blitzkrieg

The COVID-19 digital vax pass is the Panzer tank of the next wave of the global public health Blitzkrieg.  If a person complies and gets their COVID-19 shots, they get a personal QR code. They can show this code on their smart phone to participate in society.  This plan is being rolled out around the world and has spread from Israel to Europe to Australia, and now has been established in the most strategic U.S. cities including Washington D.C., New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.  Some people with a whole lot of power are now seizing a whole lot more power in the name of public health.

In Israel it has been used the longest.  They call it the Green Pass, also translated as “Green Mark.”  Israel first used it back in the spring and reinstated it in August. Under this program, your smart phone shows your Green Mark QR code to validate that you’re up to date on your Pfizer COVID shots.  With the pass, you’re allowed to be served at a restaurant; you can enter a library or the community pool; you can visit your elderly mom at the nursing home.  Some employers require it. Until recently in Israel, if you got your two Pfizer COVID-19 shots, your QR code would be activated.  But starting Oct. 3, shots received over six months ago, voided the passport. The 3rd shot, the booster, was required. This applies to everyone ages twelve and up.

There is an important guidance for COVID-19 vax passports that the World Health Organization published at the end of August 2021.  The title of this guidance is Technical Specifications and Implementation Guidance on Digital Documentation of Covid-19 Certificates. This “Guidance” provides direction to countries as they issue digital COVID-19 vax passes, so that all these will meet common standards and potentially function together.

Guess who paid for the work?  Under the acknowledgements, it says that the work was funded by Bill Gates’ foundation and four other funders.

Some of the things in the Guidance are pretty hard to believe — you have to read them for yourself.  For starters, everyone in the world with a vaccine passport receives their own ID number.  This is called a “globally unique identifier” on page 18 and includes an alphanumeric number and a machine scannable QR code.

The Guidance requires your COVID-19 vaccination history to be verified by the digital signatures of authorized persons, like DocuSign.  Once you’re up to schedule with your COVID jabs and your papers are in order, you get the PASS, which the Guidance defines as, “A document that gives an individual the authorization to have access to something, such as public spaces, events and modes of transport.”  If your globally unique machine scannable QR code checks out, then as long as it does, you will have permission to participate in society.

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