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Brownstone Institute

EU Digital Identity Wallet Pilots Roll Out Under the Radar

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Stavroula PabstSTAVROULA PABST

As 2023 continues, the European Commission appears busy developing and running pilots for its EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), which it intends to make available to all EU citizens in the near future. But while the European Commission (EC) boasts the prospective EUDI’s convenience, security, and wide range of prospective use cases in daily life, what’s less discussed is the tool’s potential for a bevy of ethical and surveillance-related issues.

What is the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI)?

The EU Digital Wallet, often referred to as the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), is slated to be offered to the European public in the years ahead. According to the European Commission, “EU Digital Identity Wallets are personal digital wallets allowing citizens to digitally identify themselves, store and manage identity data and official documents in electronic format. These may include a driving licence, medical prescriptions or education qualifications.”

As legislation streamlining their slated use across Europe is finalized, the European Commission is advancing its efforts to roll out EUDIs amongst the general European public, where over 250 private corporations and public authorities are participating in four large-scale pilot projects. At the time of writing, the EU has invested €46 million into these pilots.

Indeed, a wide range of use cases are already being tested in the EUDI pilot projects. These include using the wallets to access government services, register, and activate SIM cards for mobile network services, sign contracts, facilitate travel, and present educational credentials. All together, these use cases suggest the Digital Identity Wallets’ prospective utilization across a wide range of services essential to daily life.

Convenience, But for Whom?

The European Commission frequently plays up the digital wallet’s convenience, with messaging boasting that users will be able to use the Wallets to check into hotels, file tax returns, rent cars, and securely open bank accounts. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen highlighted the following in a 2020 State of the Union address, where she proposed the concept of a “secure European e-identity:”

Every time an App or website asks us to create a new digital identity or to easily log on via a big platform, we have no idea what happens to our data in reality. That is why the Commission will propose a secure European e-identity. One that we trust and that any citizen can use anywhere in Europe to do anything from paying your taxes to renting a bicycle. A technology where we can control ourselves what data is used and how.

Certainly, von der Leyen is correct that “we have no idea what happens to our data” when we create online accounts or log in to private services, positing that Digital ID can work to solve a core problem many people have when using the internet.

But critically, the European “e-identity,” and digital identification methods generally, pose a bevy of new issues for civilians in both the short and long term. Namely, while Digital ID can provide users access to services, a 2018 WEF report on Digital ID admits the tool’s propensity to exclude; “[f]or individuals, [verifiable IDs] open up (or close off) the digital world, with its jobs, political activities, education, financial services, healthcare and more.”

And indeed, within the control of a corrupted state or other governance structures, Digital ID’s propensity to “close off” the digital world appears ripe for misuse or abuse. Researcher Eve Hayes de Kalaf, for example, writes in the Conversation that “states can weaponise internationally sponsored ID systems” against vulnerable populations. She highlights an example from the Dominican Republic, where long-term discrimination against Haitian-descended persons manifested in the stripping of their Dominican nationality in 2013, rendering them stateless.

Meanwhile, it’s not difficult to imagine others falling through the digital “cracks” as Digital ID systems become mainstream and interconnected with, if not a prerequisite for, accessing critical social and financial services and supports.

As Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal elucidate in 2021 reporting for the Grayzone, for example, the 2017 introduction of Aadhaar, India’s biometric ID system, “which tracks users’ movements between cities,” led to a spate of deaths in rural India as difficulties accessing the Aadhaar system functionally blocked goods and benefits recipients from accessing the country’s ration stores, leaving them to even starve. India’s Scroll reported that, in a random sampling of 18 villages in India where biometric authentication had been mandated to access government-subsidized food rations, 37 percent of cardholders were unable to obtain their rations.

Despite the devastation it has caused, Aadhaar has ultimately been promoted as a success, and Rest of World reports that India’s setting up international partnerships to export its popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI), an instant payment system which uses the Aadhaar biometric ID system as its base, elsewhere.

Clearly, Digital ID poses significant possible societal harms if implemented hastily. Despite these possible harms, as I note for Unlimited Hangout, a near-universal adoption of Digital ID systems increasingly appears inevitable, with “Juniper Research [estimating] that governments will have issued about 5 billion digital ID credentials by 2024, and a 2019 Goode Intelligence report [suggesting] digital identity and verification will be a $15 billion market by 2024.”

Further, legislative strides have been made towards the digital wallet’s interoperability across the EU. In other words, key services are being hyper-centralized across borders and digitized in ways more traceable than paper counterparts could have been — all at the authorities’ fingertips.

Critically, the EUDI Wallet is apparently slated to connect with or otherwise include financial services, where EU citizens will be able to use their EUDI to open bank accounts and even apply for loans. Further, language from a European Central Bank policy brief on the European Digital Identity Framework suggests that the “EUDI wallet will bring benefits to all the stakeholders of the payment ecosystem” even including “foreseen support for the digital euro.”

While the European Commission’s keen to spotlight the EUDI’s alleged benefits for “the stakeholders of the payment ecosystem,” it appears less eager to discuss the dangers surrounding the plausible, if not likely, linkage of digital identity with money, and especially digital currencies, where elite capacities to track, or even manipulate or block civilians’ abilities to accept or make payments, could be unprecedented.

In short, EU Digital Identity Wallets are slated to be convenient for everyday civilian use. At the same time, these wallets, and other adjacent digital ID systems budding elsewhere, could also be convenient for governments and governance structures looking to surveil, monitor or otherwise manipulate or control critical aspects of citizens’ lives en masse.

The DIIA Connection

Despite its lack of EU member status and war on its hands to boot, Ukraine is involved in the EU Digital Wallet pilots. Namely, as I reported on my Substack, DIIA, Ukraine’s hyper-centralized state-in-a-smartphone app, is assisting the EU Digital Wallet’s rollout. In fact, Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov highlighted in a Telegram post from July that DIIA representatives had even showed off the DIIA app’s capabilities at the POTENTIAL (Pilots for European Digital Identity Wallet) Consortium this summer.

Notably, many of the EU Digital Wallet’s use cases being tested in the pilots are already reality with Ukraine’s DIIA app. Indeed, Ukrainians use DIIA for a range of day-to-day activities, including to verify their identities to use banking services, hold a variety of digital IDs (such as drivers’ licenses and biometric passports) and even pay certain taxes and access social services for families. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation has emphasized its intention to make all public services available online: DIIA is to be the “one-stop-shop” for these services.

And, as I’ve mentioned before in previous reporting for my Substack and Unlimited Hangout, DIIA’s scope creep continues as conflict deepens, with the app providing war-adjacent services. Ukrainian civilians affected by war have received stipendsthrough the app, for example, and can also verify their identities through DIIA to sign into e-Vorog (“e-enemy”), a chatbot that allows Ukrainian citizens to report information about Russian military whereabouts to the state.

All together, these conditions suggest DIIA may serve as a kind of blueprint for or precursor to Europe’s adjacent Digital Wallet, where the EU Digital Wallet, already a centralized application slated to assist citizens in a number of critical day-to-day services, could take on a growing number of government services across the European Union. While it remains to be seen what happens with the Digital Wallet rollouts in Europe, the wallet’s EU-wide implementation and smartphone app format, where features can be easily introduced, removed, or edited at will, means that scope creep on a comparable scale cannot be ruled out.

Conclusion

Many people are understandably interested in digital documents and other easy ways to access public services and complete tasks in a digital age. But these services and tools, when facilitated by states and adjacent governance structures, and unaccountable members of the private sector, come with significant ethical and surveillance concerns that should be extensively discussed and debated by the public. In this respect, it appears the prospective EU Digital Identity Wallet is no exception.

But debate or not, Digital Wallet pilot rollouts and EU member states’ respective Digital ID adoption is ongoing, with an EC press statement explaining that “everyone will have a right to have an EU Digital Identity” accepted in all EU Member States.

And while the European Commission communicates “there will be no obligation” to use an EU Digital ID Wallet, EC report Communication 2030 Digital Compass: The European Way for the Digital Decade elucidates that a 2030 target for the EU is for 80 percent of citizens to use an “electronic identification solution.” Ultimately, the mixed messaging leaves room for speculation that, even if Digital IDs are not obligatory when introduced, the general population could somehow be nudged or eventually even mandated into adopting Digital IDs to access key public services.

While Digital ID proponents emphasize the tools’ capacity for convenience and security in an increasingly online world, the ethical and privacy issues I’ve highlighted here signal that, if rolled out hastily, the EU Digital Identity Wallets could ultimately have disastrous and lasting consequences for privacy and civil liberties. And, once implemented, it seems Digital IDs could be difficult to roll back even if unpopular, ultimately nudging people into a technocratic nightmare they cannot easily escape.

In short, the dangers posed by emerging Digital ID systems like the EUDI Wallet cannot be discounted as Europe grows into its “digital decade.”

Author

  • Stavroula Pabst

    Stavroula Pabst is a writer, comedian, and media PhD student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Athens, Greece. Her writing has appeared in publications including Propaganda in Focus, Reductress, Unlimited Hangout and The Grayzone

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Brownstone Institute

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

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From the Brownstone Institute

By IAN MILLER

By late 2020, the media and public health establishment had two obsessions. One of their obsessions involved forcing the public to wear masks, even though the mountains of data and several studies had already confirmed that they don’t stop the transmission of respiratory viruses. The second obsession was forcing everyone to take Covid vaccines, regardless of their actual efficacy, risk of side effects, age or underlying health, or the vaccines’ rapidly waning efficacy.

Neither of those obsessions has abated, though even the most extreme, hardened Covid extremists have acknowledged that the vaccines were flawed, mandates were a mistake, and side effects should be acknowledged.

The media, unwilling to give up on the increased power, influence, and moral judgment it gained during the pandemic, has refused to accept that it effectively ended years ago.

So it’s no surprise that media outlets have noticed that, as we’ve seen every single summer since 2020, cases have increased, predominantly across the Western and Southern United States. Thankfully though, Los Angeles media, of course it had to be Los Angeles, has determined the culprit.

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

Turns out it’s not seasonality causing the increase, it’s outdated Covid vaccines and a lack of public masking, of course!

NBC Los Angeles “reported” that Covid cases in California and Los Angeles have “doubled” in the last month. This sounds horrifying and scary, doesn’t it? Yet it again, as is so often the case with Covid coverage, is misleading.

Let’s take a look at the current daily average of new cases in Los Angeles County:

Cases are so low they’re functionally indistinguishable from zero.

You can see why the media is scared, given how dramatic this surge appears to be compared to those in the previous four years. And thanks to NBC’s crack reporting and expert analysis, we know why this terrifying increase is happening. Spoiler alert: it’s all your fault that you haven’t controlled an uncontrollable respiratory virus with individual behavior that has no impact whatsoever on the spread of the coronavirus.

“People aren’t necessarily wearing masks; they’re not required to in certain places,” nurse practitioner Alice Benjamin, referenced as an expert by NBA LA said. “We’re traveling, we’re getting out for the summer. We also do have some reduced immunity. The vaccines will wane over time.”

Nowhere in the story is it mentioned that the massive jump in Covid cases in late 2021 and early 2022 happened immediately after LA County Public Health issued a press release celebrating the county for achieving 95+ percent masking rates at indoor businesses. No one seems willing or able to ask this nurse practitioner why she believes wearing masks would reduce this “surge,” if it failed so spectacularly in previous surges.

Endless Misinformation from ‘Experts’

She wasn’t done with the misinformation though. Benjamin warned that not enough Angelenos are getting the “updated” vaccine, which explains the summer increase.

“If you got it in October and later, that’s generally the updated vaccine,” Benjamin said. “If you got it prior to October, double check because if you did get the bivalent which has not been phased out, we recommend you do get an updated vaccine.”

And according to her, everyone should get it. Because the CDC said so.

“Per CDC recommendations, anyone 6 months or older should have at least one of the updated Covid vaccines,” Benjamin said.

Though, of course, no one on the crack NBC Los Angeles team thought to ask Benjamin why the “updated” October vaccine would help against the now common FLiRT variant when it emerged six months after the “updated” vaccine was released. Especially when the “study” process for booster doses is effectively nonexistent anyway. Pfizer and Moderna churn out a “targeted” dose that is supposed to protect against a variant that’s no longer circulating, never has to show any real-world benefit, and the regulatory agencies sign off on it, while the CDC recommends everyone get it.

Rinse, repeat.

Nor did anyone ask her what possible rationale there could be for forcing six-month-old babies to get vaccinated with a booster that has no studied efficacy against the currently circulating variant.

Her comments and the media reaction exemplify the problems with Covid discourse that started in 2020 and will apparently continue forever. A complete and purposeful ignorance of the facts, the data, and the evidence base. A willingness to advocate for the same sort of restrictions and interventions that have already failed. Ignorance of the booster process and endless appeals to public health authorities. Even though those authorities have made countless mistakes and refused to update their findings after being proven wrong.

The obvious question is: How does this type of absurdist discourse ever end? The answer, as we continue to see, is it doesn’t.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.” His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack newsletter, also titled “Unmasked.”

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Brownstone Institute

The Pandemic Excuse for a Corporatist Coup

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

We’ve just come across a document hosted by the Department of Homeland Security, posted March 2023, but written in 2007, that amounts to a full-blown corporatist imposition on the US, abolishing anything remotely resembling the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. It is right there in plain sight for anyone curious enough to dig.

There is nothing in it that you haven’t already experienced with lockdowns. What makes it interesting are the participants in the forging of the plan, which is pretty much the whole of corporate America as it stood in 2007. It was a George W. Bush initiative. The conclusions are startling.

“Quarantine is a legally enforceable declaration that a government body may institute over individuals potentially exposed to a disease, but who are not symptomatic. If enacted, Federal quarantine laws will be coordinated between CDC and State and local public health officials, and, if necessary, law enforcement personnel…The government may also enact travel restrictions to limit the movement of people and products between geographic areas in an effort to limit disease transmission and spread. Authorities are currently reviewing possible plans to curtail international travel upon a pandemic’s emergence overseas.

“Limiting public assembly opportunities also helps limit the spread of disease. Concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas, shopping malls, and other large public gathering places might close indefinitely during a pandemic—whether because of voluntary closures or government-imposed closures. Similarly, officials may close schools and non-essential businesses during pandemic waves in an effort to significantly slow disease transmission rates. These strategies aim to prevent the close interaction of individuals, the primary conduit of spreading the influenza virus. Even taking steps such as limiting person-to-person interactions within a distance of three feet or avoiding instances of casual close contact, such as shaking hands, will help limit disease spread.”

There we have it: the pandemic plans. They once seemed abstract. In 2020, they became very real. Your rights were deleted. No more freedom even to have house guests. In those days, the rule was to enforce only three feet of distance rather than six feet of distance, neither of which had any basis in science. Indeed, the actual scientific literature even at that time recommended against any physical interventions designed to limit the spread of respiratory viruses. They were known not to work. The entire profession of public health accepted that.

Therefore, for many years before lockdowns wrecked economic functioning, there had been two parallel tracks in operation, one intellectual/academic and one imposed by state/corporate managers. They had nothing to do with each other. This situation persisted for the better part of 15 years. Suddenly in 2020, there was a reckoning, and the state/corporate managers won it. Seemingly out of nowhere, liberty as we have long known it was gone.

Back in 2005, I first came across a Bush administration scheme, an early draft of the above, that would have ended freedom as we know it. It was a scheme for combating the bird flu, which officials back then imagined would involve universal quarantines, business and event closures, travel restrictions, and more.

wrote: “Even if the flu does come, and taxpayers have coughed up, the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings…It is a serious matter when the government purports to plan to abolish all liberty and nationalize all economic life and put every business under the control of the military, especially in the name of a bug that seems largely restricted to the bird population. Perhaps we should pay more attention. Perhaps such plans for the total state ought to even ruffle our feathers a bit.”

For years I wrote about this topic, trying to get others interested. It was all there in black and white. At the drop of a hat, under the guise of a pandemic that only state managers can declare, real or drummed up, freedom itself could be abolished. These plans were never legislated, debated, or publicly discussed. They were simply posted as the result of various consultations with experts, who worked out their totalitarian fantasies as if scripting a Hollywood film.

The 2007 blueprint is more explicit than anything I’ve seen. It comes from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, which “includes executive leaders from the private sector and state/local government who advise the White House on how to reduce physical and cyber risks and improve the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure sectors. The NIAC is administered on behalf of the President in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act under the authority of the Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security.”

And who sat on this committee in 2007 that decided that governments “may close schools and non-essential businesses”? Let us see.

  • Mr. Edmund G. Archuleta, General Manager, El Paso Water Utilities
  • Mr. Alfred R. Berkeley III, Chairman and CEO, Pipeline Trading Group, LLC, and former President and Vice Chairman of NASDAQ
  • Chief Rebecca F. Denlinger, Fire Chief, Cobb County (Ga.) Fire and Emergency Services
  • Chief Gilbert G. Gallegos, Police Chief (ret.), City of Albuquerque, N.M. Police Department
  • Ms. Martha H. Marsh, President and CEO, Stanford Hospital and Clinics
  • Mr. James B. Nicholson, President and CEO, PVS Chemical, Inc.
  • Mr. Erle A. Nye, Chairman Emeritus, TXU Corp., NIAC Chairman
  • Mr. Bruce A. Rohde, Chairman and CEO Emeritus, ConAgra Foods, Inc.
  • Mr. John W. Thompson, Chairman and CEO, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Brent Baglien, ConAgra Foods, Inc.
  • Mr. David Barron, Bell South
  • Mr. Dan Bart, TIA
  • Mr. Scott Blanchette, Healthways
  • Ms. Donna Burns, Georgia Emergency Management Agency
  • Mr. Rob Clyde, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Scott Culp, Microsoft
  • Mr. Clay Detlefsen, International Dairy Foods Association
  • Mr. Dave Engaldo, The Options Clearing Corporation
  • Ms. Courtenay Enright, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Gary Gardner, American Gas Association
  • Mr. Bob Garfield, American Frozen Foods Institute
  • Ms. Joan Gehrke, PVS Chemical, Inc.
  • Ms. Sarah Gordon, Symantec
  • Mr. Mike Hickey, Verizon
  • Mr. Ron Hicks, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation
  • Mr. George Hender, The Options Clearing Corporation
  • Mr. James Hunter, City of Albuquerque, NM Emergency Management
  • Mr. Stan Johnson, North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC)
  • Mr. David Jones, El Paso Corporation
  • Inspector Jay Kopstein, Operations Division, New York City Police Department (NYPD)
  • Ms. Tiffany Jones, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Bruce Larson, American Water
  • Mr. Charlie Lathram, Business Executives for National Security (BENS)/BellSouth
  • Mr. Turner Madden, Madden & Patton
  • Chief Mary Beth Michos, Prince William County (Va.) Fire and Rescue
  • Mr. Bill Muston, TXU Corp.
  • Mr. Vijay Nilekani, Nuclear Energy Institute
  • Mr. Phil Reitinger, Microsoft
  • Mr. Rob Rolfsen, Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Mr. Tim Roxey, Constellation
  • Ms. Charyl Sarber, Symantec
  • Mr. Lyman Shaffer, Pacific Gas and Electric,
  • Ms. Diane VanDeHei, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA)
  • Ms. Susan Vismor, Mellon Financial Corporation
  • Mr. Ken Watson, Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Mr. Greg Wells, Southwest Airlines
  • Mr. Gino Zucca, Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Resources
  • Dr. Bruce Gellin, Rockefeller Foundation
  • Dr. Mary Mazanec
  • Dr. Stuart Nightingale, CDC
  • Ms. Julie Schafer
  • Dr. Ben Schwartz, CDC
  • Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Resources
  • Mr. James Caverly, Director, Infrastructure Partnerships Division
  • Ms. Nancy Wong, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO)
  • Ms. Jenny Menna, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO)
  • Dr. Til Jolly
  • Mr. Jon MacLaren
  • Ms. Laverne Madison
  • Ms. Kathie McCracken
  • Mr. Bucky Owens
  • Mr. Dale Brown, Contractor
  • Mr. John Dragseth, IP attorney, Contractor
  • Mr. Jeff Green, Contractor
  • Mr. Tim McCabe, Contractor
  • Mr. William B. Anderson, ITS America
  • Mr. Michael Arceneaux, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA)
  • Mr. Chad Callaghan, Marriott Corporation
  • Mr. Ted Cromwell, American Chemistry Council (ACC)
  • Ms. Jeanne Dumas, American Trucking Association (ATA)
  • Ms. Joan Harris, US Department of Transportation, Office of the Secretary
  • Mr. Greg Hull, American Public Transportation Association
  • Mr. Joe LaRocca, National Retail Federation
  • Mr. Jack McKlveen, United Parcel Service (UPS)
  • Ms. Beth Montgomery, Wal-Mart
  • Dr. J. Patrick O’Neal, Georgia Office of EMS/Trauma/EP
  • Mr. Roger Platt, The Real Estate Roundtable
  • Mr. Martin Rojas, American Trucking Association (ATA)
  • Mr. Timothy Sargent, Senior Chief, Economic Analysis and Forecasting Division, Economic and Fiscal Policy Branch, Finance Canada

In other words, big everything: food, energy, retail, computers, water, and you name it. It’s a corporatist dream team.

Consider ConAgra itself. What is that? It is Banquet, Chef Boyardee, Healthy Choice, Orville Redenbacher’s, Reddi-Wip, Slim Jim, Hunt’s Peter Pan Egg Beaters, Hebrew National, Marie Callender’s, P.F. Chang’s, Ranch Style Beans, Ro*Tel, Wolf Brand Chili, Angie’s, Duke’s, Gardein, Frontera, Bertolli, among many other seemingly independent brands that are all actually one company.

Now, ask yourself: why might all these companies favor a plan for lockdowns? Why might WalMart, for example? It stands to reason. Lockdowns are a massive interference with competitive capitalism. They provide the best possible subsidy to big business while shutting down independent small businesses and putting them at a huge disadvantage once the opening up happens.

In other words, it is an industrial racket, very much akin to interwar-style fascism, a corporatist combination of big business and big government. Throw pharma into the mix and you see exactly what came to pass in 2020, which amounted to the largest transfer of wealth from small and medium-sized business plus the middle class to wealthy industrialists in the history of humanity.

The document is open even about managing information flows: “The public and private sectors should align their communications, exercises, investments, and support activities absolutely with both the plan and priorities during a pandemic influenza event. Continue data gathering, analysis, reporting, and open review.”

There is nothing in any of this that fits with any Western tradition of law and liberty. Nothing. It was never approved by any democratic means. It was never part of any political campaign. It has never been the subject of any serious media examination. No think tank has ever pushed back on such plans in any systematic way.

The last serious attempt to debunk this whole apparatus was from D.H. Henderson in 2006. His two co-authors on that paper eventually came around to going along with lockdowns of 2020. Henderson died in 2016. One of the co-authors of the original article told me that if Dr. Henderson had been around, instead of Dr. Fauci, the lockdowns would never have taken place.

Here we are four years following the deployment of this lockdown machinery, and we are witness to what it destroys. It would be nice to say that the entire apparatus and theory behind it have been fully discredited.

But that is not correct. All the plans are still in place. There have been no changes in federal law. Not one effort has been made to dismantle the corporatist/biosecurity planning state that made all this possible. Every bit of it is in place for the next go-around.

Much of the authority for this whole coup traces to the Public Health Services Act of 1944, which was passed in wartime. For the first time in US history, it gave the federal government the power to quarantine. Even when the Biden administration was looking for some basis to justify its transportation mask mandate, it fell back to this one piece of legislation.

If anyone really wants to get to the root of this problem, there are decisive steps that need to be taken. The indemnification of pharma from liability for harm needs to be repealed. The court precedent of forced shots in Jacobson needs to be overthrown. But even more fundamentally, the quarantine power itself has to go, and that means the full repeal of the Public Health Services Act of 1944. That is the root of the problem. Freedom will not be safe until it is uprooted.

As it stands right now, everything that unfolded in 2020 and 2021 can happen again. Indeed, the plans are in place for exactly that.

Author

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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