The first thing to abandon is certainly vax card verifications. I know a handful of anti-vax folks and without fail every single one has printed out a fake vax cards on their home printer and gotten past any and all vax verifiers they encounter. It’s security theater at its most extreme, akin to requiring all websites to display a “your payment is processed securely” message on their payment page.

Consider: if you have some deep set anti-science/anti-government beliefs, and the government says you can’t go into any restaurants unless you submit some science card to them, do you abandon your deep set fears and have yourself injected, or do you search up “print vaccine card” and hit Cmd+P?

That's honestly pretty weird to me. If as a government you're going to be requiring vaccination proofs, why not go all the way and get cryptographically secure certificates encoded into a QR code?

You mean like Europe and much of the rest of the world? "Freedom" or something?

Yes, that is what I mean. I dont think the freedom argument makes sense since you already have to carry your Vax card with ID, so if you're going to be a bit authoritarian why not just do it right?

I think the argument (which to be clear, I don't agree with) is that there isn't a big federal database of vaccinations. Now mind you, if people understood how the EU QR codes work (public/private key), they'd realize this wasn't an issue, but if people are staunchly anti-vax / anti-science, this is probably a big ask...

But also, just to be clear: This doesn't prevent "forgeries" from circulating. Those aren't home-made, but you can just copy a QR code from someone else. And next-to-noone is checking the ID (which in theory would be required to close that point). And even if the ID were to be checked, all you need to find is one doctor or pharmacist, that is willing to misread your yellow book (WHO vaccination booklet).

I'd still say: There isn't much use in the proofing system. Just do vaccinations Israel-style. I.e. have the option to get vaccinated literally everywhere and without our "but you need an appointment" and "but your last dose needs to be 6 month ago" (the latter is getting better).

> And next-to-noone is checking the ID (which in theory would be required to close that point)

In Germany, stores and restaurants do check the ID now as well as actually scan the certificate - it took a couple of weeks and a bunch of fines being handed out, though.

> And even if the ID were to be checked, all you need to find is one doctor or pharmacist, that is willing to misread your yellow book (WHO vaccination booklet).

The amount of doctors or pharmacists willing to risk their license and imprisonment is thankfully extremely low - the overwhelming majority follows the rules and calls the police upon discovery of fake WHO booklet entries (see e.g. https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/rheinland/gefaelschte-Impfau...).

> I'd still say: There isn't much use in the proofing system. Just do vaccinations Israel-style. I.e. have the option to get vaccinated literally everywhere and without our "but you need an appointment" and "but your last dose needs to be 6 month ago" (the latter is getting better).

The Israel-style vaccination system is clearly better than what is available in most Western countries, but it relies on a population that sees getting vaccinated and protecting themselves as a patriotic duty (with the notable exception of the Ultra-orthodox Jews). Offering easy access to vaccinations doesn't help against widespread propaganda or, as we see in Germany, myths of "vaccination dictatorship", "mind control" and other similar bollocks.

> And next-to-noone is checking the ID (which in theory would be required to close that point).

Depends on the country. France doesn't usually check the ID when they scan the QR codes. Switzerland more often than not does, at least in the German speaking part of the country where I live.

1. What powerful political and economic interests WANT those things to stay in place? They are mostly bad for both politics AND economics.

2. Its crazy to me that one of the things coming out of all of this is that we should get rid of quarantining. I wish the conclusion people came to was "wow, we should definitely have people quarantine when theyre sick instead of going to work and getting coworkers sick"

And you need to get your conspiracy theories out of your head.

There is nothing, NOTHING, humanity agrees on. No way in hell would you get 200 odd governments to 'conspire' against you.

That’s actually an entertaining picture. Imagine all these countries from US, Russia, Norway and Germany to North Korea, Japan, Iran, India and Syria, etc. all sitting around a table, all in concert, with the same goal and executing a perfect plan at nearly the same time and keeping it secret from people and do so successfully.

But to be honest, when you see what some people believe and how gullible some can be, you won’t get surprised if someone actually claims that these happened and a significant number of people believe it. It’s scary.

Wouldn't surprise me if the amount of waste an ICU unit creates were literally 100x to 1000x the waste of a person not needing that care

There was a viral tweet a couple weeks ago that showed just how much medicine was required to keep one person alive for a single day (https://twitter.com/drfrocester/status/1456668662744633349).

No idea if it is realistic though, that fentanyl pile on the left looks like you could tranquilize a herd of elephants with it.

Seems today early to me.

This is true. Omicron is milder than the flu

What powerful political and economic interests want these boondoggles to stay in place?

Basically all of big tech?

And why do they want this?