Vaccination surveillance : in Africa, GAVI and Mastercard are testing the biometric Wellness Pass
It's not quite all-out digital identity yet, but we're getting close:
GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, supported by Bill Gates, the WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank , and a few others are currently testing a digital health passport in Africa intended to allow immediate verification of the vaccination status of its user. Cleverly, the Wellness Pass presents itself not as a medical surveillance document but as an offline medical record to facilitate and improve care in countries where the retention of medical data is uncertain, in particular for the most “marginalized” populations. We thus highlight the needs arising from conflict situations where entire groups are forced to flee due to a natural disaster or conflict, and find themselves without medical documents.
The Wellness Pass, billed as a convenient way to track patients in “underserved communities” across “multiple touchpoints,” contains “tokenized” biometric data allowing assured identification of wearers. In addition to the medical data stored on the card, vaccination certificates are also listed, which makes it possible to check the date of injections and, above all (as the Mastercard website specifies) “adherence to vaccination cycles”.
The Wellness Pass supported by the promoters of the company without cash
The program was first tested in Mauritania in December 2021; Ethiopia followed in June 2022; two million people are affected in the Addis Ababa region. Mastercard, which is actively working towards the advent of a world without cash (World Beyond Cash™), has already contributed large sums to the promotion of vaccination, including two payments of $25 million each on the occasion of covid , including 10 million for the Wellness Pass.
GAVI and Mastercard present these pilot projects as intended to “effectively deliver vaccines to millions of children, track identity and vaccination records in a digitized way, and incentivize the provision of vaccines. » Historically, GAVI has provided children in the Third World with conventional vaccines. Today, the Alliance is disseminating the new mRNA vaccines while helping their manufacturers avoid the financial risks linked to the side effects of these shots with recent technology,emphasizesThe Blaze.
From the Wellness Pass to the super health pass, there is only one step
The case obviously brings to mind the health passes set up in France and conditioning access to numerous health establishments and places from leisure to covid vaccination (or recent contamination). The Wellness Pass is not required to circulate or access particular places… but it could be; and with its private medical data, biometric devices and vaccination histories, control would be greatly facilitated and increased.
In its pilot testing phase, "clients" were assured of being able to decide for themselves which people or establishments will be able to have access to the data, and to which data . It’s the kind of promise that only binds those who receive it.
We can ask ourselves the question: is this a sort of full-scale surveillance test for GAVI and Mastercard under the pretext of philanthropy? Today in Africa, tomorrow in the rest of the world…