October 8, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Starting next week, two major airlines, United and Cathay Pacific, will start trials at Heathrow, London with new smartphone software that acts as a digital health passport for travelers.
“CommonPass,” which at present offers travelers the possibility of carrying digital proof of a recent negative COVID-19 test, aims to include proof of vaccination when this becomes available, allowing passengers simply to cross borders and board commercial flights by letting a QR code be scanned on their personal mobile phone.
CommonPass, dubbed the “world’s first COVID passport” by the London Daily Mail, was developed by “the Commons Project,” a “nonprofit public trust established to build platforms and services to make life better for people around the world,” and “Unlocking the full potential of technology and data for the common good.” Its main page reveals that it “was established with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.”
The CommonPass itself was developed by the Commons Project with help from the World Economic Forum (WEF), under whose guidance top government and corporate leaders foregather yearly at the Davos summit in Switzerland to talk about global – and global governance – issues.
The CommonPass is being touted as a state-of-the-art application that will allow people all over the world to resume air travel in “pre-COVID” proportions by giving authorities in all countries access to secure and verified information that will be difficult to forge, while at the same time permitting traveler identification. Passengers themselves, the (WEF) underscores in a promotional video, will enjoy the “privacy” CommonPass affords them, as they will only share determined health information.
The truth of the matter suggested by this new worldwide app is, of course, that global rules with global implementation will allow control of all potential travelers (from country to country, from city to city) with regard to their COVID-19 status.
At present, a “positive” test effectively prohibits travelers from crossing certain borders and boarding certain aircraft, even if the results were obtained by the notoriously inaccurate PCR test (or nose swab) that identifies a large proportion of past infections long after a person has ceased to be contagious.
The World Economic Forum and other international bodies are making it increasingly clear that when a vaccine is developed, it will most probably be made a prerequisite for travel.
This is not a completely unprecedented situation: a number of subtropical countries require a yellow fever vaccination certificate to allow travelers into their borders. The novelty is that the COVID-19 vaccine, if and when it comes, will pose many questions, and not only medical ones. On the one hand, it appears improbable that proper safety testing will have been completed given the rush to commercialize the shot as quickly as possible. Also, its efficiency against a mutating virus is anything but certain. Besides, COVID-19 has a low lethality rate as compared with other diseases such as yellow fever.
The moral issue is a much more serious one. In a recent interview with LifeSite, Bishop Athanasius Schneider warned that Christians have an obligation to refuse the COVID vaccine if it is derived from aborted babies.
He spoke of his fears and “suspicions” regarding this bleak scenario: “The vaccine will be imposed and obligatory – so that you cannot work, travel, go to school without it, obliging the entire population to receive the vaccine, but the only vaccine will be that made with cells from aborted babies. Perhaps they will not accept other vaccines, and they will lie, saying that these are not effective, that the only effective vaccine will be from aborted babies. I am not affirming now that this will happen, but it is my suspicion: it appears to me realistic that this could come. This is for me the last step of Satanism: that Satan and the world government – ultimately the masonic world government – will oblige all, even the Church, to accept abortion in this way. And therefore we must resist very strongly against this, if it comes. We must even accept to be martyrs.”
Even if this worst-case scenario does not play out, imposing a potentially dangerous vaccine to stop the spread of a not so dangerous virus carries with it the possibility of a communist-type dystopia all over the world through the assistance of modern tracking, surveillance and identification techniques. China already has some such an arrangement through its “social score” system, which gives bad marks to jay-walkers, bad debtors, people who discredit communist China, people who go on banned internet sites and other “disobeyers” that deprive them of the right to use planes, fast trains, buy a house, go to luxury hotels or restaurants or enroll their children in private schools.
There is a difference: with COVID-19 and CommonPass – which could of course be extended to other activities than air travel – the surface idea is to “protect” others from death or grave illness, equating dissent with harmfulness to others.
According to the World Economic Forum, “CommonPass aims to develop and launch a standard global model to enable people to securely document and present their COVID-19 status (either as test results or an eventual vaccination status) to facilitate international travel and border crossing while keeping their health information private. Recognizing that countries will make sovereign decisions on border entry and health screening requirements, including whether or not to require tests or what type of test to require, CommonPass serves as a neutral platform which creates the interoperability needed for the various 'travel bubbles' to connect and for countries to trust one another's data by leveraging global standards.”
The WEF’s site adds: “For governments, airlines, airports, and other key stakeholders throughout the end-to-end travel journey, CommonPass aims to address these key questions: How can a lab result or vaccination record from another country be trusted? Is the lab or vaccination facility accredited/certified? How do we confirm that the person who took the test is indeed the person who is traveling? Does the traveler meet border entry requirements?”
This is also interesting: one of the objectives is to “support a range of health screening entry requirements that vary from country to country and will evolve through the course of the pandemic and beyond.” Things might not stop at PCR tests and vaccine records: CommonPass is ready.
The “non-profit” app was imagined first to meet requirements in East Africa, where it was tested in its developing stages to allow the members of the East African Community (one of the numerous integrated economic regions in the world) to work together to make truck transportation available between six countries including Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda despite COVID-19. All of these densely populated countries have low infection rates and even lower death rates due to the Wuhan coronavirus.
According to the Financial Times, it is the aviation industry that is currently pushing for a unified approach instead of national regulations including voluntary quarantining for passengers from some regions. The tests with the digital health pass that are being run as of this Thursday involve journeys on United Airlines and Cathay Pacific routes linking travel hubs including London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. The trials are being monitored by government agencies, “including US border officials and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” according to the Financial Times.
The daily quoted Christoph Wolff, the WEF’s head of mobility, as saying: “Individual national responses will not be sufficient to address this global crisis. Bans, bubbles and quarantines may provide short-term protection but developed and developing nations alike need a long-term, flexible, and risk-based approach.”
There’s nothing like a health crisis with an “invisible enemy” to promote global governance.