These proposed international digital health passes could be used to restrict and monitor the movement of individuals or different groups of people by simply changing the criteria, thereby enabling governments and corporations to coerce human behaviour by, for instance, denying access to infrastructure or services.
The joint declaration follows recommendations from Indonesia’s Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin made during a Business 20 (B20) panel held ahead of the G20 summit.
Sadikin said,“Let’s have a digital health certificate acknowledged by WHO — if you have been vaccinated or tested properly — then you can move around.”
The vague requirement of “tested properly” would presumably be squarely at the discretion of the WHO. Sadikin added that the benefit of a global WHO-standardised vaccine passport would be to facilitate international travel and that G20 countries have agreed to such a global digital health certificate. The idea is to introduce the certificate as a revision to the IHR framework at the next
World Health Assembly, scheduled for May 2023 in Geneva, Switzerland.
One has to ask why President Ramaphosa would agree to this and commit South Africa to the “digital transformation” envisaged in the joint declaration when the vehement opposition to the implementation of vaccine passports in SA appeared to be considered by government and sufficient to shut down talk thereof during Covid.
Paragraph 19 states, “We support the work of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) that will draft and negotiate a legally binding instrument that should contain both legally binding and non-legally binding elements to strengthen pandemic PPR and the working group on the International Health Regulations that will consider amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) (2005) mindful that the decision will be made by World Health Assembly.”
A majority of WHO member states on July 21, during a meeting of WHO’s
Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB),
agreed to pursue a legally binding pandemic instrument that will contain “both legally binding as well as non-legally binding elements.”
The new or revised “pandemic treaty” will build on the existing international framework for global pandemic response, the WHO’s IHR, considered a
binding instrument of international law.
As stated above, the IHR framework already
allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.
As part of the
process of revising the IHR, the INB will meet again in December and will deliver a progress report to the 76th World Health Assembly of the WHO in 2023.
Paragraph 20 states: “In this regard, we welcome the establishment of a new Financial Intermediary Fund for Pandemic PPR (the ‘Pandemic Fund’) hosted by the World Bank.”
The G20 health ministers have agreed to establish a pandemic fund. The fund will be commonly used to fix the health system and close the budget gap for the following five years, based on how the COVID-19 pandemic has been handled in the previous two years.
The World Bank will manage the fund to help low- and middle-income countries prevent and address future pandemics, drawing commitments from more than 20 country donors, of which South Africa is one, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. More pledges are expected.
Members “acknowledge the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) technical expertise and central coordination role in this endeavour, which reflects its leadership role in the global health architecture.” All this points to the centralisation of pandemic management and, considering the WHO’s failed COVID-19 response, following its central coordination is foreboding.
Paragraph 23 further states: “We support the WHO mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub.”
This hub, the only one in the world so far, is in South Africa. Unless actual mRNA trials will be conducted in respect of new mRNA technology, in light of what we do know about mRNA Covid-19 vaccine harms, this hub may do more harm than good.
