‘CommonPass’: New COVID-19 safety features Will Make fitness a Prerequisite for the journey

 Imagine standing at a TSA security checkpoint on your way home for the vacations. You’re preparing to travel through the awkward travel procedures instituted shortly after 9/11 when the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) was created and aviation within us morphed into an exploration and seizure operation with the implied possibility of your detention and interrogation.

The initial outrage such expressions of implicit state violence caused timely eventually gave thanks to a begrudging acceptance. But now, a replacement layer of “security,” that would restrict freedom of movement even further, is being extended at several ports of entry in partnership with health technology industry leaders, academic institutions, and government health entities in additional than three dozen countries.

A new digital certificate called CommonPass, designed to function a clearance mechanism for passengers supported a health diagnosis underwent its first transatlantic test on October 21 under the watchful eye of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at Heathrow Airport in London. There, a gaggle of select participants commenced United flight 15 to Newark, New Jersey after being screened and tested for COVID-19 at the purpose of departure in an exceedingly largely ceremonial exercise that included initiative co-founders, Paul Meyer and Bradley Perkins.

The app’s first experiment passed with much fewer media fanfare last month on a Cathay Pacific Airways flight from city to Singapore and marked the start of the CommonPass pilot program launched by The Commons Project non-profit organization in-tandem with the planet Economic Forum.

Travel industry insiders claim that CommonPass will allow international travel resumes before a COVID-19 vaccine is formed widely available by applying standard methods for certification of lab results and vaccination records of travelers through the CommonPass Framework, supported criteria set by the governments of every port of entry.


A graphic from a Commons Project presser lays out the fundamentals of the CommonPass

J.D. O’Hara, CEO of 1 of the world’s largest travel services companies and one of the participants at Wednesday’s CommonPass tryout, hailed the app’s ability to “verify health

information in an exceedingly secure, verified manner,” while Roger Dow of the U.S. Travel Association released a press release praising it for paving a “way forward” for the world economy within the wake of the pandemic.

As the multi-sector, global response to the coronavirus tightens the noose around civil liberties, CommonPass stands out collectively of the foremost appalling and dangerous attacks on basic human rights within the name of public health and is rife with a possible for abuse so great, that it behooves us to seek out out more about the people and interests behind it.


In medieval times, the ‘commons’ denoted the de facto and collective ownership of land, which peasants wont to plow, sow and harvest or raise sheep and cattle. the increase of the land-owning classes in post-Magna Carta Europe, and England particularly, slowly eviscerated this kind of communal privilege through the enclosure system, which redistributed the commons to the proto-capitalist class in partnership with the monarchies and builds the system of oppressive labor exploitation called feudalism.

Starting in 1604, the Enclosure Acts of England created legal property rights for land that had belonged to the farmers and shepherds, forming the idea of modern-day capitalism. Today, that scene is being repeated because the Internet, an information ‘commons’ is being carved out by Big Tech and led by organizations just like the Commons Project, which avails itself of a reputation that connotes the whole opposite of its purpose.

Co-founders Paul Meyer and Bradley Perkins are the non-profit’s CEO and Chief medical practitioner, respectively. Perkins began his career over thirty years ago in the middle for Disease Control and, for nearly a decade, worked at the RAND corporation’s health care policy division, RAND Health planning board. Meyer, for his part, could be a Yale grad school graduate, who was writing President Clinton’s speeches years before receiving his graduation diploma from the storied institution. Both have extensive career histories within the fields of health and technology, though in very different areas and with strange bedfellows along the way.

In 2009, Perkins became the Chief Technology Officer for a publicly-traded cross-national operator of hospitals and clinics called Vanguard Health Systems. Vanguard had been established with funding from Morgan Stanley and controlled by the Blackstone Group since 2004, maintaining control at some stage in the company’s IPO in 2011. Two years later, Vanguard was acquired by Tenet Healthcare, creating the third-largest investor-owned hospital company within us with a complete of 65 hospitals nationwide and over 500 healthcare facilities.


Paul Meyer, center, is pictured in a very screenshot of a media briefing touting CommonPass

Besides being one of the largest healthcare companies within us, Tenet is additionally one in every of the foremost notoriously corrupt. the identical year it bought Vanguard, it had been slapped with a serious whistleblower complaint that disclosed the company’s fraudulent practices. That lawsuit resulted in a $514 million settlement. A more modern case involving a conspiracy between Oklahoma orthopedic surgeons at one of its facilities was settled for $66 million in 2019. But, Tenet’s problems return even further to the first 2000s when fraud and performing unneeded surgeries led to a mess of lawsuits and even a Senate investigation.

The Vanguard deal marked the top of Perkins’ tenure there, who chose to require a $1.9 million package rather than joining the newly merged conglomerate like its CEO and far from its staff did. He would progress to make an organization of his own called Sapiens Data Science; a health-tech platform that gives access to “credible scientifically validated data algorithms” and appears to form a “new revolutionary health ecosystem.”

Meyer’s background is more complicated, and his arrival on the healthcare scene runs through different channels linked to American intelligence cover operations dating back to NATO’s war in Kosovo and also the former Yugoslavia during the first Clinton years. it's his involvement with an infamous human-trafficking outfit called the International Rescue Committee or IRC, that ought to be cause for concern given his role within the Commons Project and flagship CommonPass app.


Before he was named Young Global Leader by the globe Economic Forum or Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and even before becoming a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and receiving MIT’s 2003 Humanitarian of the Year award, Paul Meyer found himself in war-torn Kosovo installing a brand new Internet infrastructure system to switch the one destroyed within the war, only days after NATO bombs had stopped shelling the Serbian people.

Barely out of the school of law and having spent two years writing President Clinton’s speeches because the conflict within the former Yugoslavia was transpiring, Meyer was tapped by the IRC to steer a UN and personal relief effort called the web Projekti Kosova (IPKO) or Kosovo Internet Project, with tech-savvy local Akan Ismaili to handle the complex technical issues and Teresa Crawford from the Advocacy Project to “uplink” satellites within the region with the stated purpose of reuniting displaced Albanian families. The system was founded atop a building employed by country KFOR Civil-Military Cooperation CIMIC and British Royal Engineers were also brought onto the project, among others.

Eventually, the IRC gave the project to a non-profit organization “dedicated to providing wide access to the web in Kosovo.” IPKO is today the most important telecom, internet, and cable TV company in Kosovo. Meyer remains involved through the IPKO Foundation, which he co-founded to supply “free technology education” to Kosovar students.

By the 1950s, the IRC was known to be an “integral link” within the CIA’s covert network led by national leader protégé and former British minister, David Miliband since 2013. In 2018, the IRC was embroiled in an exceedingly child-sex trafficking scandal dubbed the “sex-for-food scandal” covered extensively by Whitney Webb in a very recent article. The organization’s cover-up of dozens of sex abuse, bribery, and fraud allegations resulted in the U.K. government withdrawing its funding from the organizations. However, no IRC employees were prosecuted over the 37 incidents detailed within the report.

Currently, the IRC is incredibly involved within the implementation of a biometric ID system for refugees of the continued conflict in Myanmar, a project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation-backed ID2020 Alliance, which also funds The Commons Project. IRC’s Mae La initiative, however, receives most of its funding through the notorious CIA-cutout USAID and intends to make a “blockchain-based digital identification” system using iris recognition technology to convey refugees' access to IRC’s services in Thailand. Long-term goals include rolling health, work, and financial data together into one ID system, that may determine access to food, healthcare, and mobility.


The difference between IRC’s Mae La project and therefore the Commons Project may be a question of sophistication. Class status, to be specific. But, it's essentially the identical idea and covers the identical interests of the groups and individuals who form a part of} the Commons Project’s board of trustees; many of whom are part of the digital tracking and healthcare technology space for years.

People like Linda Dillman, who ran Wal-Mart’s implementation of RFID employee tracking technology because of the retail giant’s CIO or the previous Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bryan Sivak, who is now a manager at Kaiser Permanente, one amongst the biggest healthcare insurance plan providers within the nation. Other trustee affiliations stand out, as well, like Will Fitzpatrick, General Counsel to the Omidyar Network, and George W. Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense, Health Affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder, Jr.

At the core of those efforts is that the desire to make a DNA-based population screening agenda, which individuals like Perkins and Meyer are forcefully pushing forward. Perkins worked because of the CMO at an organization called Human Longevity, Inc., which “combines state-of-the-art DNA sequencing and expert analysis with machine learning, to assist change medicine to a more data-driven science.”


A microbiologist demonstrates a whole-genome DNA sequencing machine called a MiSeq at CDC HQ in Atlanta. David Goldman | AP

Meyer developed a precursor to CommonPass in 2016, when he merged his mobile health services company, Voxiva, which implemented the “first nationwide digital disease surveillance systems in Peru and Rwanda” in partnership with the CDC, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with Sense Health to create a health messaging service called Well pass Meyer described as “an integrated platform… [that] helps overcome the challenges of deploying fragmented engagement and population health solutions.”


The reliability of the DNA-based, algorithmically-deduced health diagnoses used for the CommonPass experiment must even be called into question given the history of the corporate furnishing the technology. Prenetics, Ltd is that the Hong Kong-based, Alibaba-funded company that also performed the COVID-19 testing for the UK’s Premier League’s Project Restart, which used an identical health status app called Covi-Pass, covered by this author in June.

Prenetics’ COVID tests depend upon DNA-based technology it acquired in 2018 when it purchased DNAFit; an organization founded by South African businessman Avrom “Avi” Lasarow, who came on board after the merger as Prenetics’ Chief officer for Europe, geographic region, and Africa. Lasarow, who also heads the Premier League’s coronavirus testing program, just settled a civil case against him within the U.S. last May for nearly $60,000 surrounding allegations of “deceptive health claims”.

“Lifestyle genetics pioneer” Lasarow contains a long data of settling out of court over such issues, including a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2015, which accused Lasarow Healthcare Technologies Ltd., aka L Health Ltd., and two other defendants of constructing false or unsubstantiated claims regarding a “melanoma detection” app. As a part of that settlement, Lasarow was “prohibited from making any misleading or unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits or efficacy of any product or service.”

Prenetics has been reportedly acting on establishing a partnership with VSTE Enterprises, the identical company that developed the V-Code technology that underpins Covi-Pass, since May. Nevertheless, such red flags pale compared to the individuals and organizations that are behind CommonPass, itself, who have plans for a far vaster digital enclosure supported DNA population screening technologies through initiatives just like the Commons Project, which aims to fundamentally transform medicine and impose new limits on our freedom of movement because the CommonPass rollout is slated to quickly expand to other routes across Asia, Africa, dry land, Europe, and therefore the geographic region.


Just as Bush’s Aviation and Transportation Security Act opened the doors sure as shooting technology and security sectors to flourish within the wake of 9/11, this novel health-focused expansion of the national security state has bypassed all levers of democratic power to permit for the entrenchment of a far larger and more dangerous group of entities, within the health, technology, and life sciences industries along with an increasingly more powerful clique of federal health agencies and officials, like Robert Kadlec, who are pushing for a full-spectrum surveillance society.

Taking your shoes off at the airport and exposing your body to radiation has become routine now at every airport within the nation and most ‘temporary’ laws more experienced emergency legislation remain on the books nearly 20 years later. Precedent demands that we assume the identical will occur with the bulk of the new restrictions on our freedom of movement and quality of life currently being implemented throughout the country and therefore the world.

Rolling back these draconian measures isn't in any of their plans, as promised by the president of the U.S. Travel Association, Roger Dow, who confidently asserted after Wednesday’s successful CommonPass trail run, that the app will allow us to “navigate out of the crippling economic fallout of COVID-related travel restrictions and quarantine requirements,” adding that it'll “pay further dividends for more seamless and convenient travel even once the pandemic has subsided.”