Thats Right States like Texas and Florida got the Vaccine Passport Conspiracy from Del Bigtree.
https://abc7.com/politics/texas-governor-bans-vaccine-passport-requirement-in-state/10491161/
AUSTIN, Texas -- Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday morning prohibiting state agencies or political subdivisions in Texas from creating a "vaccine passport" requirement.
Conversation has grown around vaccine passports recently as an option that can be used for travel or even eating out.
They are typically described as an app with a code that verifies if someone has been vaccinated or recently tested negative for COVID-19. They're already in use in Israel, and in development in parts of Europe.
But Abbott shut that down as an option in the Lone Star State with Executive Order No. GA - 35 also prohibiting "organizations receiving public funds from requiring consumers to provide documentation of vaccine status in order to receive any service or enter any place."
"Government should not require any Texan to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives. That is why I have issued an Executive Order that prohibits government-mandated vaccine passports in Texas. We will continue to vaccinate more Texans and protect public health - and we will do so without treading on Texans' personal freedoms," the governor said in a video.
Abbott's not alone in this move. Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis also issued an order in his state on Friday banning vaccine passports and barring businesses from requiring proof of vaccination, saying that requiring them would infringe on personal freedom and decisions.
DeSantis said he expected the Legislature to pass a similar law. His order said requiring "so-called COVID-19 vaccine passports for taking part in everyday life - such as attending a sporting event, patronizing a restaurant, or going to a movie theater - would create two classes of citizens.
As of a few days ago, GOP senators in Pennsylvania were drawing up legislation that would prohibit vaccine passports from being used to bar people from routine activities.
"We have constitutional rights and health privacy laws for a reason," said Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, a Republican. "They should not cease to exist in a time of crisis. These passports may start with COVID-19, but where will they end?"
Benninghoff said this week his concern was "using taxpayer money to generate a system that will now be, possibly, in the hands of mega-tech organizations who've already had problems with getting hacked and security issues."
A Democratic colleague, Rep. Chris Rabb of Philadelphia, sees value in vaccine passports if they are implemented carefully.
"There's a role for using technology and other means to confirm people's statuses," Rabb said. "But we do have concerns around privacy, surveillance and inequitable access."
Republican legislators in other states have also been drafting proposals to ban or limit them. A bill introduced in the Arkansas Legislature on Wednesday would prevent government officials from requiring vaccine passports for any reason, and would ban their use as a condition of "entry, travel, education, employment or services."
The sponsor, Republican state Sen. Trent Garner, called vaccine passports "just another example of the Biden administration using COVID-19 to put regulations or restrictions on everyday Americans."
President Joe Biden's administration has largely taken a hands-off approach on vaccine passports.
At a news conference this week, Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said he considered them a project for the private sector, not the government.
He said the government is considering federal guidelines to steer the process surrounding vaccine passports. Among its concerns: Not everyone who would need a passport has a smartphone; passports should be free and in multiple languages; and private health information must be protected.
"There will be organizations that want to use these. There will be organizations that don't want to use these," said Dr. Brian Anderson of Mitre, which operates federally funded research centers and is part of a coalition working to develop standards for vaccine certifications to make their use easier across vendors.
Anderson noted the Vaccination Credential Initiative is not making recommendations on how - or even if - organizations choose to use the certifications.
In Montana, GOP lawmakers this week voted along party lines to advance a pair of bills that would ban discrimination based on vaccine status or possession of an immunity passport, and to prohibit using vaccine status or passports to obtain certain benefits and services.
And a freshman Republican state lawmaker in Ohio spoke out about the concept, saying more restrictions or mandates are not the answer to every COVID-19 problem.
"Ohioans are encouraged to take the COVID-19 vaccine for the health and well-being of themselves and others," Rep. Al Cutrona said. "However, a vaccine should not be mandated or required by our government for our people to integrate back to a sense of normalcy."
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, a newly elected member who has embraced and promoted a range of far-right political positions, told her supporters on Facebook earlier this week that "something called a vaccine passport" was a form of "corporate communism" and part of a Democratic effort to control people's lives.
And a GOP lawmaker in Louisiana has teed up a bill to keep the state from including any vaccination information on the Louisiana driver's license or to make issuance of a driver's license subject to vaccine status.
In New York, a government-sponsored vaccine passport called the Excelsior Pass is being introduced. A smartphone app, it shows whether someone has been vaccinated or recently tested negative for COVID-19.
Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo touted the idea as letting an event venue usher, for example, use their own smartphone to scan a concertgoer's code.
New York officials have not released specific details about how the app will work, access someone's vaccination or testing status or protect a user's name, date of birth or the location where their code was scanned. The app's privacy policy says data will be "maintained in a secure manner" and won't be used for sales or marketing purposes or shared with a third party. But some privacy experts say the public needs more specifics to ensure its information is protected.
Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project at the Urban Justice Center, a New York-based civil rights and privacy group, warned the Excelsior Pass creates a new layer of surveillance without sufficient details about how it collects data or protects privacy.
"We basically only have screenshots of the user interface and not much more," Cahn said of Excelsior Pass.
First, signs went up around Williamsburg in synagogues and grocery stores and on street corners, advertising an international conference call with seven dial-in numbers on four different continents.
Then came robo calls in Yiddish, urging people to talk to their rabbis about children they know who've supposedly been injured by vaccines. The group launched a crowdfunding campaign that aimed to educate the “thousands of parents and children [who] are the victims of vaccinations, and don’t even know it,” before GoFundMe pulled it from the site following an inquiry from WNYC.
As local governments in Rockland County and New York City have taken increasingly restrictive measures to stop the spread of measles, the small fraction of the ultra-Orthodox community that opposes vaccines have ramped up efforts too, with support from the national anti-vaccination movement.
The man at the center of it all is TV-producer-turned-YouTube host Del Bigtree.
“My God made me perfect. I am not born into an original sin that needs 72 vaccines,” Bigtree shouted at a recent rally in Austin, Texas, to a cheering crowd. “For those Hasidic Jews in New York right now, who never thought this moment would come, I am saying, ‘I stand with you.’”
Bigtree then took out a Star of David like the one used to mark Jews in Nazi Germany and pinned it to his chest, to make a point about Rockland County.
“How are we going to know if you’re not vaccinated, how are we going to arrest you? Maybe we’ll do it the same way we did the last time,” he said.
Bigtree’s statements were condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. The Auschwitz Memorial in Poland wrote on Twitter that “instrumentalizing the fate of Jews who were persecuted by hateful anti-Semitic ideology and murdered in extermination camps like #Auschwitz with poisonous gas in order to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a symptom of intellectual and moral degeneration.”
But Bigtree has been embraced by the small portion of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community who oppose vaccines.
A movie Bigtree made about vaccines — with the infamous British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who insinuated that the measles vaccine had caused 12 children to become autistic — was referenced in an early piece of propaganda circulated throughout ultra-Orthodox communities in the metro area. Audio versions of Bigtree’s YouTube series on vaccines have been archived on the group’s long-standing hotline. Most recently he was invited in by an ultra-Orthodox group to host one of their latest conference calls at the end of March.
Bigtree’s message at the Austin rally about God creating him perfectly is echoed by seemingly disparate groups of people who oppose vaccines, from ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents to liberal-leaning parents at private schools.
It’s the same refrain used in an affidavit from parents of an unvaccinated child in Rockland County who’d been barred from attending Green Meadow Waldorf School, a secular private school:
“We believe that R. was created perfectly,” the affidavit reads, “and the injection of foreign substances is against our religious beliefs.”
This belief came up again last week in South Williamsburg, where a small group of women who opposed vaccines spoke to reporters after the city announced a mandatory vaccination rule in certain zip codes where the measles outbreak was ongoing.
“God has designed a perfect design,” said Gitty, a young mother. “He has designed my child — he’s amazing — he has designed my child as perfect as can be.”
Nevertheless, most major rabbinical authorities have come out to support vaccination.
“It is downright dishonest to officially attest that Jewish law forbids vaccination,” wrote Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt from the Rabbinical Alliance of America in a recent open letter.
Bigtree is not the only figure on the national anti-vaccination circuit to take interest in New York’s ultra-Orthodox community. Barbara Loe Fisher, who runs the National Vaccine Information Center, is listed as a contributing researcher in a manual about the dangers of vaccines targeted to the ultra-Orthodox community.
And on Monday, attorney and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the Kennedy political dynasty sued New York City on behalf of parents of five unvaccinated children. Kennedy has been a critic of vaccines for years and recently rallied with Bigtree in California against a bill that would add further restrictions to doctors who write medical exemptions to vaccines in an effort to clamp down on fraudulent exemptions.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine and the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, has closely tracked the anti-vaccination movement. Hotez points to a 2017 measles outbreak within a Somali community in Minnesota, where Wakefield was invited to talk to concerned parents multiple times by anti-vaccination activists who feared the measles vaccine caused autism, according to a report from the Washington Post. During that outbreak, 65 people caught measles.
Hotez sees what’s happening in New York as a progression of those efforts.
“This is predatory behavior specifically targeted at Jews and at Jewish children,” Hotez said. “The anti-vaccine movement is now very opportunistic. They’ll identify groups where they think they can make progress in stopping vaccinations; and then are very predatory and unfortunately...they've chosen now to target the Orthodox Jewish community.”
Bigtree, however, denied his work with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community was predatory. He acknowledged he made a film with Wakefield, but said they don’t work together day to day.
“How is truth predatory?” Bigtree said. “I think it’s my duty as an American, as a journalist to tell people the truth, instead of the cover-up.”
There have been 465 measles cases across the country so far this year. An estimated 84 percent of those were in the ultra-Orthodox communities of New York City and Rockland County, where at least 21 have been hospitalized and 9 needed intensive care. Of those who caught the measles, the vast majority had not been vaccinated.
Correction: This post has been updated to reflect that Dr. Peter Hoetz is a vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine, not Baylor College, and that "most major rabbinical authorities have come out to support vaccination," not "all major rabbinical authorities."
Gwynne Hogan is an associate producer at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @GwynneFitz.
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