The World Health Organization (WHO) announced it will adopt the European Union’s digital Covid vaccine passport framework to create a global network of digital health certificates. What was long maligned as a conspiracy theory is coming to pass. The new initiative will be called the Global Digital Health Certification Network.
Read about the dangers of vaccine passports and how they kill civil liberties here.
The WHO said it will “take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats.”
The EU’s Covid vaccine certificate was enforced in July 2021 and issued to over 2.3 billion people.
In a statement, WHO’s Director-General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus said that “building on the EU’s highly successful digital certification network, WHO aims to offer all WHO Member States access to an open-source digital health tool.”
“New digital health products in development aim to help people everywhere receive quality health services quickly and more effectively,” he added.
The European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides said: “Today is a new chapter in global cooperation on digital health. It will help to place WHO at the center of our global health architecture.”
The WHO’s new initiative comes at a time when the use of vaccine passports has reduced and after the global public health organization said that Covid was no longer a public health emergency.
Critics of vaccine passports argue that they could be used to discriminate and deny people access to public services. Others view them as an invasion of privacy by equipping governments with the power to spy on people’s health, as well as create a checkpoint society.
The idea of a global vaccine passport was criticized by Australian senator Alex Antic, who argued that it was “just another conspiracy theory coming true.”
