Vaccination certificates, also known as vaccine passports, will be on the agenda at next month’s G7 Summit in the UK.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson hopes that the upcoming summit will reach agreement on COVID-19 vaccine passports and opening talks on a “world treaty” to prepare for future pandemics.
The summit is set to take place June 11 – 13 in Cornwall, England. President Joe Biden is scheduled to attend, along with the leaders of the other G7 countries, which include Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Prime Minister Johnson, as host, has also invited India, Australia, South Korea, and South Africa to attend as guest countries.
During his Sunday interview with CBC Canada, Johnson stated that, first of all, the whole world must be vaccinated as soon as possible, arguing that “nobody’s safe until everybody’s safe,” and that he “knew” President Biden and other G7 leaders were “keen” on this.
“What we want the G7 to try to agree is that instead of vaccinating the whole world by 2024 or 2025…. We need to get this done by the end of next year.”
Johnson praised the vaccination program that he believed was the reason for the declining number of infections, particularly in his country.
A key part of Johnson’s message at the upcoming summit will be the need to start a collaboration on a global agreement on pandemic preparedness on a number of levels.
“Clearly we need to have agreement on things like vaccine passports” and other measures, said Johnson. When the pandemic started in March 2020, “it was like a Tower of Babel moment,” when countries were acting more in isolation than as a team. He said the year of 2020 was a “terrible year” for the globalists — “the believers in a global cooperation.” With the grappling for things such as PPE [personal protective equipment] and the medical supplies amid diminished supply, “the world became balkanized,” Johnson added. “We need to do better that this.”
Last Friday morning, during an interview on Good Morning America, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration was taking “a very close look” at the possibility of vaccine passports for travel into and out of the United States.
However, by Friday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security rebuffed Mayorkas’ statement. DHS principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said there won’t be any federal vaccination database nor any mandate that requires people to get a single vaccination credential. It also said there are no plans for anything like a U.S. passport.
Jaen-Pierre also added the agency is looking at how to ensure Americans traveling abroad have a quick and easy way to enter other countries. The DHS statement said Mayorkas was referring to “ensuring that all U.S. travelers will be able to easily meet any anticipated foreign country entry requirements.” It did not elaborate on how that would be accomplished. And it did not directly address the question of vaccine passports.
Several countries — including Israel, Japan, Denmark, Estonia, and Thailand — and the European Union, are already using a vaccine passport system.
Following the last week’s meeting between the health ministers from the G7, Canadian Federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu said that she and her G7 colleagues agree they need to coordinate the development of vaccine passports.
“The G7 partners agreed that there needs to be some consistency and some collaboration among the countries, so we have some kind of system that would be recognizable, no matter where a person was travelling,” Hajdu said.
Despite the White House’s repeated denials of the development of the vaccine passports, vaccination database, or any such certification mandates, these statements may be highly deceiving.
The Washington Post reported on May 28 that the Biden administration and private companies are working hard to develop a standard way of handling credentials — aka “vaccine passports” — that would “allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against COVID-19.”
According to the Post, “the administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology…. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days.”
It is said that there are at least 17 passport initiatives underway, such as a World Health Organization-led global effort and a digital pass devised by IBM that is being tested in New York State, or a Vaccination Credential Initiative, which is a coalition endeavoring to standardize how data in vaccination records is tracked
All of the programs are “rapidly moving forward,” the Washington Post reported, “even as the White House deliberates about how best to track the shots and avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated.”
