China Urges W.H.O. to Let It Run Global ‘Vaccine Passport’ System
Chinese Communist Party “experts” urged the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Tuesday to let China build and run a global database for “vaccine passports” documenting if every person on earth has received a Chinese coronavirus vaccine.
The Communist Party launched its domestic “vaccine passport” system Wednesday, despite W.H.O. officials urging countries not to implement such a system due to unequal access to vaccines and the variety in the quality of the available offerings around the world. The “vaccine passport” — A digital certification that confirms a person has received a coronavirus vaccination — joins China’s larger “social credit system,” which judges every citizen and awards them numerical “scores” based on how much the Party approves of their behavior. The behavior judged can vary from littering and volunteering, which result in respectively lower or higher social credit scores, to the display of public opinions either in favor or against the Communist Party.
China’s social credit system has prevented millions of citizens from traveling through banning them from purchasing airplane, train, or public transportation tickets. China is similarly limiting citizens who do not receive a vaccine against the Chinese coronavirus from widespread travel.
China’s Global Times, a state-run propaganda newspaper, proposed Tuesday that the Communist Party could build an international “vaccine passport” surveillance system in a week through its large technology companies. The proposal appeared to be a response to the W.H.O. explicitly discouraging countries from creating such a system.
“Chinese experts noted on Tuesday that China can help by sharing its experience with and provide technical support to the WHO to organize the issue,” the Times reported, “as China is the most experienced country in using a health code system in the world while the WHO is the most proper organizer for the matter to ensure independence, fairness and data security.”