The Book of Jewish Holidays

Imagine being physically denied access to your office, business or livelihood. Imagine being refused entry to a shop or being told who you can or cannot sit with at a restaurant. Imagine being barred from a hospital room when you or your family member needs critical care.

Unthinkable? Today, these scenarios and worse are happening in ‘democracies’ all over the world, and could be our collective future – orchestrated by AI, Big Tech and state-sponsored apps – all in the name of ‘protecting’ public health with vaccine passports.

The stakes could not be higher. If you do not have a vaccine passport, you will be prevented from accessing basic services, from earning a living or travelling within your own country. Even if you do have one, you will be exposed to unprecedented levels of government and corporate surveillance, data mining and behavioural control.

In Scanned, investigative journalist Nick Corbishley examines and exposes the lies and overreach that underpin the wholesale erosion of personal freedoms that is happening at an alarming rate. In clear language supported by rigorous research, Corbishley uncovers how the rollout of vaccine passports not only represents an unprecedented violation of privacy and bodily autonomy, but how it perpetuates the idea that a ‘small’ collective sacrifice will allow us to return to normality.

If things continue on the current path, Corbishley makes clear, getting back to ‘normal’ is never happening. Put simply, instead of a return to normality, we will see the creation of a starkly different form of existence in which most of us will have virtually no agency over our own lives.

Inside Scanned, you’ll also find:

• The massive implications of a tech-enabled digital ID, social credit systems and biometric tracking
• How basic freedoms and privacy are being handed over to the state and private companies without our knowledge or consent
• How government programmes and increased surveillance will facilitate discrimination, segregation and stigmas for huge segments of the population

Few people want to be seen as outliers, especially if it means feeling responsible or being blamed for the suffering and deaths of others.

‘But there is a fundamental flaw in applying the “greater good” argument to vaccine passports,’ Corbishley writes, ‘because the passports themselves offer precious little in the way of potential good – and a huge amount in the way of potential harm.’

This is not a liberal or conservative debate. This is not a vaccinated or unvaccinated debate. This is about freedom, global democracy and how much we are willing to give up. This is about deciding when it is time to say, ‘enough!’

Nick Corbishley is a writer, journalist, teacher, and translator based in Barcelona. Formerly a senior contributing editor at the San Francisco–based economics and finance news site Wolf Street, he is currently a regular contributor to the US financial news and analysis blog Naked Capitalism, where he writes about financial, economic, and political trends and developments in Europe and Latin America. He also worked for many years at a well-respected business and economics journal in Spain. Nick is an occasional speaker (in English or Spanish) on economic, political, and geopolitical topics. Nick holds a BA in history from Sheffield University, speaks three languages (English, French, and Spanish) and is a regular visitor to his beloved country-in-law, Mexico.