The WHO announces that it has begun developing a “world health passport” based on the EU’s controversial digital Covid passport. The justification given is that this will help against “future health threats”.
It was during the coronavirus crisis that several countries introduced a medical apartheid system with the help of the so-called covid passports, or vaccine passports, which citizens had to show if they wanted to travel or go to a restaurant, for example. In the EU, the passports were called the ‘digital green certificate’ and were introduced in the summer of 2021. Sweden also introduced the passports whereby Swedes had to show that they had been injected with the Covid vaccine in order to go to the cinema or a concert, for example.
The WHO will now adopt the EU’s covid passport system to establish a global health system for “future health threats, including pandemics”. The decision was taken last November in an agreement between Stella Kyriakides, EU Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
– Building on the EU’s highly successful digital certification network, WHO aims to offer all WHO Member States access to an open-source digital health tool, which is based on the principles of equity, innovation, transparency and data protection and privacy, the Director-General says.
The WHO will work closely with the EU to develop the system, known as the WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN), as well as working together to manage and implement the “World Health Passport”. The reason given for continuing to develop the system is that it believes that the Covid passports were a “key element” in the coronavirus pandemic, as well as for tourism in member states.
“With this collaboration, WHO will facilitate this process globally under its own structure with the aim to allow the world to benefit from convergence of digital certificates”, writes the WHO.
Furthermore, it is claimed that the development of the digital world health system will be done with openness and transparency, data protection, privacy and also security, claiming that the WHO will not have access to underlying data on individuals.
The first building block of the global WHO system goes live this June and will continue to be developed progressively in the coming months.
