Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis upped the ante on his administration’s efforts to resist the nationwide trend of coronavirus measures and surveillance on April 2 when he signed an Executive Order banning vaccine passports in his state.
In the Order, DeSantis, a Republican, says “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 theatre–would create two classes of citizens based on vaccination,” adding “It is necessary to protect the fundamental rights and privacies of Floridians and the free flow of commerce in the state.”
The decree prevents any Government agency at any level of Florida from issuing documentation that would certify a person’s vaccine status to a third party. It also bars businesses from requiring customers to show papers evidencing their vaccination status.
“It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society,” said DeSantis at a press conference on March 29.
DeSantis directed all state agencies to work to ensure compliance with the Order. Businesses who do not comply with the regulation will lose grants and contracts issued by the State of Florida.
“If you do a vaccine passport to say ‘Yeah you know, if you want to go to a movie theatre, or you want to go on a plane, or you want to do that,’ that is a bridge further than we have ever gone in this country, without question,” said the Governor.
“We’re not going to do it. This would be an unprecedented expansion I think of using this both with public or with private power, and that’s why I think that businesses should not be allowed to be doing this either, because I think it just puts us down a slippery slope and I think it’ll end up being in a situation that we’ll live to regret in the future.”
On March 28, Washington Post published an article revealing a presentation by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology entitled COVID-19 Vaccine Credentials Discussion, where Director Micky Tripathi was not shy to say nationwide vaccine passports were coming to America, “As more of the population becomes vaccinated, proof of immunization will likely become a major, if not the primary, form of health status validation.”
In one slide in Tripathi’s presentation, he used specific verbiage which advocated for “Use cases for day-to-day activities rather than just international port-of-entry checks,” before adding that the installation of vaccine passports, a system that works in essence much like communist China’s social credit score, would become the new normal as a result of big business, “However, current trends suggest that vaccine credentials could nevertheless become a market-imposed de facto requirement for an individual’s return to day-to-day activities.”
In March, DeSantis was one of the first Governors to buck the trend of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus measures after abolishing the state’s mask mandate and eliminating fines issued by law enforcement for COVID-19 bylaw infractions.
DeSantis also took action at the beginning of March to crack down on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltration in the Florida government and business sector. The shift in direction in state policy came immediately on the back of the Republican annual convention, the Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Orlando on Feb. 28 where the installation of socialism by the Biden administration and Democratic Party, as well as the threat of the CCP were heavily discussed over the weekend event.
Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our email list
