The Patriot Post® · Vaccine Passports: Totalitarian AND Racist

“Americans are not stupid. Data is the new way to control everybody, and this unholy marriage of data and this health focus, this vaccine focus, is an incredibly, demonically brilliant way to control everyone.” —author and former Al Gore presidential campaign adviser Naomi Wolf

In late March, New York became the first state to issue a vaccine passport known as the “Excelsior Pass.” It’s an app that will allow New Yorkers to prove their vaccination status, or recent history of a negative COVID-19 test, in order to gain entry to events and businesses. Governors in Illinois and Hawaii have expressed interest as well.

By contrast, a duplicitous Biden administration is getting the private sector to do its data-aggregating dirty work, as it was also revealed in March that the White House is working with companies in that regard. “The government is not viewing its role as the place to create a passport nor a place to hold the data of citizens,” stated Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House COVID-19 Response Team. “We view this as something that the private sector is doing, and we’ll do what’s important to us.”

Yet Slavitt also made it clear that the government would be putting its proverbial thumb on the scale. “We think we can essentially put forward guidelines and guidance,” Slavitt added. “And given the federal government’s source and role in society from everything from the [Transportation Security Administration] to the [Veterans Administration] to the Department of Health and Human Services … we have a major impact in what will get done. So we’re putting forward our principles very clearly.”

Principles? A racially obsessed Democrat Party and its virtue-signaling private sector allies — the very same entities grown quite comfortable accusing America of “systemic racism” — are poised to endure an epic beatdown, based on such coercive “principles.”

One wholly of their own making.

For weeks, the Biden administration’s media allies sought to frame white conservatives as the most “vaccine hesitant” cohort of Americans. And, as always, they couldn’t conceal their bicoastal elitism when doing so. “The White House is working to reach vaccine-hesitant white conservatives the best way they know how: between episodes of Deadliest Catch, NASCAR races, and country music TV programming,” Teen Vogue reported.

Press Secretary Jen Psaki signaled the administration’s support of that effort. “We’re looking for a range of creative ways to get directly connected to white conservative communities,” she said. “We won’t always be the best messengers, but we’re still trying to meet people where they are, but also empower local organizations.”

As recently as Monday, the UK’s Daily Mail framed a “huge fall” in U.S. vaccination rates in terms of geography, insisting the slowdown is driven by the “South and Midwest.” Again, the implication is that the Bitter Clinger Crowd was gumming up the works for their far more “enlightened” counterparts on the coasts and in the Northeast. Further categorizing that resistance, a Gallup poll released Monday revealed that of the one-in-five Americans who do not want to get the COVID-19 shot, 78% of them are unlikely to change their minds.

The problem with this particular framing of the agenda? It’s a calculated lie, obscuring a highly inconvenient truth.

The truth? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, as of May 24, vaccination rates broken down by race across 40 states are as follows: 54% of Asians have received the jab, followed by 43% of whites, 32% of Hispanics, and 29% of blacks.

Thus as it turns out, the two biggest groups of minorities — and black Americans in particular — are the most vaccine-hesitant people in the nation. And as the Biden administration and its allies in the private sector will soon discover, those who live by the Race Card, die by it also, as COVID “passports” become de facto segregation by race, in all its Jim Crow permutations.

Brought to America by the same Democrat Party that heartily endorsed it the first time around.

Yet it gets even worse. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1971 landmark decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the concept known as “disparate impact” was established as part of the nation’s anti-discrimination efforts. Disparate impact is defined as “an unnecessary discriminatory effect on a protected class caused by a practice or policy (as in employment or housing) that appears to be nondiscriminatory.”

In other words, vaccine passports may not only be about bad racial “appearances” for the Biden administration, and the private companies, organizations, educational institutions, etc., determined to segregate Americans according to their vaccine status. They may be illegal as well, when disproportionate numbers of minorities cannot access jobs, education, etc., relative to their white and Asian counterparts. Black and Hispanic Americans who have already endured higher unemployment rates during the pandemic, and a black-white achievement gap in education that has remained static for more than 50 years.

Perhaps nothing says “discriminatory effect” better than exacerbating those realities.

Moreover, despite all the hysterical progressive rhetoric to the contrary, the concerns of vaccine-eschewing minorities in particular, and millions of Americans in general, cannot be dismissed out of hand. The vaccines themselves are still authorized for “emergency use only,” meaning everyone who has received one is effectively a test subject. And there are few studies that address whether or not those who have already had coronavirus, and thus have immunity, will benefit or be adversely affected by adding a jab to the mix.

And then there is history: Many black Americans are fully aware of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments involving 600 black Americans treated like lab rats by the federal government for 40 years. Why should they trust government now, especially when the Biden administration and the Democrat Party are still insisting America is racist to the core?

And then there are HIPPA laws. Though the Left takes great pains to assure Americans that the presentation of vaccine passports is strictly voluntary, who’s kidding whom? The same tech companies that already track Americans’ every move can certainly determine whether or not one has has been granted access to certain venues. And if those venues have vaccinated and non-vaccinated sections, they can determine in which one a person is seated.

It wouldn’t take much extrapolation to build a data base from that info. And when the reality that the FBI attempted to access the data of everyone who was simply in Washington, DC on January 6, and tried to force the Gannet newspaper group to provide them with the names of those who simply read a USA Today story about a suspect in a child pornography case who fatally shot two FBI agents in February, the notion that aspects of our health data are off limits to these totalitarian wannabes is utterly laughable.

Columnist Jazz Shaw gets to the bottom line. “This is not freedom,” he asserts. “This is not American. This is simply tyranny.”

It is tyranny disproportionately affecting American minorities the Biden administration purports to champion. In other words, talk is cheap — and the irony is searing.