Former United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister Tony Blair has called for global organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Economic Forum (WEF) to push national governments to introduce “digital infrastructure” that monitors who has been vaccinated and who hasn’t.
Blair pushed for this government-controlled digital vaccine database during an appearance at the World Economic Forum’s 2023 annual meeting — a yearly event where powerful business leaders, politicians, and other influential figures meet in Davos, Switzerland to discuss the agendas they want to advance.
The former Prime Minister emphasized the importance of “technology and digital infrastructure” and data collection for surveilling the status of the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
“You need the data,” Blair said. “You need to know who’s been vaccinated and who hasn’t been. Some of the vaccines that will come on down the line will be multiple, there’ll be multiple shots. So you’ve got to have, the reasons to do with the healthcare more generally, but certainly, for a pandemic or for…vaccines, you’ve got to have a proper digital infrastructure, and many countries don’t have that. In fact, most countries don’t have that.”
Blair continued by suggesting that his digital vaccination status surveillance dragnet should be pushed through by the WTO (an intergovernmental organization that regulates international trade), the WEF (an unelected global organization that seeks to “shape global, regional and industry agendas”), and intergovernmental forums such as the Group of Twenty (G20) and the Group of Seven (G7).
“Who are the people that can make this happen?” Blair said. “How do you get the right partnerships in place?…That should happen in the G20 particularly, I think, which is…G7 is an important forum, but the G20 is the broader forum…You’ve got to work out what is it that you want to achieve in order to make sure that any future pandemic is properly handled and what are the partnerships that you’re going to create in order to ensure that the answers you get are the right answers. And then you’re going to have the mechanisms of implementation. And those mechanisms will be partly through the formal institutions that you have, like the WTO, and they’ll also be through organizations like yours [the WEF] which…I think…have many advantages because they don’t get landed with the same bureaucracy and frankly small pea politics around them.”
Blair’s call is the latest of several that he and his nonprofit, The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, have made for an expansion of mandatory digital surveillance infrastructure.
His institute has called for digital IDs and said increased surveillance is a “price worth paying.” Blair himself has also called for mandatory vaccine passports.
Related: How Big Government and Big Tech used COVID to accelerate the adoption of digital ID
And two of the global groups that Blair wants to help push through this digital surveillance system, the WTO and the WEF, are also huge advocates of digital surveillance systems.
The WEF and the WTO have previously pushed “global digital identity of persons and objects.” And the WEF regularly advocates for digital ID programs around the world. This year’s WEF 2023 annual meeting subjected journalists to some of the surveillance technologies it advocates for including digital IDs and biometric scanning.
Not only do these surveillance systems reduce individual privacy but vaccine passports discriminate against citizens and restrict their access to businesses and services.
And the WEF wants to expand this surveillance and discrimination via digital ID. It has proposed a system that monitors online behavior, biometrics, purchases, and more to determine access to a wide range of services.
