PASSPORTS, PLEASE? Cooper’s Vaccine ‘Information Card’ is Here

RALEIGH – After months of spin and ambiguity, Governor Roy Cooper’s vaccination “information card” is live. And it is sparking questions about Cooper’s intentions for a passport regime and the implications thereof.

Earlier this year talk of ‘vaccine passports’ spread around the country. Panic purveyors hoped to mandate a two-tiered world in which businesses and governments discriminated based on vaccination status. Republicans in North Carolina, as well as others wary of embracing such an ominous regime, were quick to push back. They demanded to know if Governor Roy Cooper had plans for a vaccine passport, or not, and asserted such a system would be unconstitutional.

Gov. Cooper still hasn’t rejected vaccine passports for North Carolina, it was noticeably absent in his reopening plan today. He needs to.

I sent a letter w/ @RepCawthorn @RepRichHudson @RepTedBudd @RepGregMurphy & @virginiafoxx calling on him to reject these passports outright. pic.twitter.com/DUOcxOFekM

— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) April 21, 2021

Cooper demurred, never rejecting the idea of vaccine passports. Instead, he repeatedly stated his desire for the business community to enforce such Pandemic Panic policies however they could while acknowledging there was no standard way to know if an individual was vaccinated or not. Further he stated the state should issue and certify the information whole taking care to not use the tainted passport term.

“They are working now to find the best and easiest way for someone who says, ‘hey, I want to show a record of my vaccine.’ We need to be able to easily get it to them,” Cooper said in April. “And I think that’s something the state should do.”

And now they have; offering a standardized, government-issued ‘Proof of Vaccination’ card, while carefully avoiding the term ‘vaccine passport.’

(As a side-note, notice that vaccine ID cards are encouraged, while Voter ID cards are treated like the plague.)

But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…

Now, an ‘information card’ is only as good as the entities enforcing their use. As a state-issued information card itself, it is not necessarily an ominous threat, but we can be all but sure that Cooper & Co. will continue pressuring businesses and government entities to implement vaccine card checks. A likely example maybe pushing card checks to require non-vaccinated individuals to mask up everywhere they go.

The new North Carolina vaccine passport comes as NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, the most notoriously flip-flopping fear monger on COVID-19, is urging local governments to issue vaccine mandates.

“I have been of this opinion, and I remain of that opinion, that I do believe at the local level, Jake, there should be more mandates,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” “There really should be. We’re talking about life-and-death situation. We have lost 600,000 Americans already.”

Cooper has reliably moved with Fauci, President Biden, and the general fear mongering narrative since day one. The only thing stopping Cooper from ever fully embracing all panic policies prescribed by Fauci and the like was that, fortunately, he doesn’t have full control over our politically diverse state.

Had he thought he could get away with it politically, Cooper would mandate vaccine passports, and maybe even the vaccines themselves. We’ve seen this impetus as the administration bumped up against a fading vaccination rate. They offered millions in prize money to get the shot, with little effect, and even had President Biden come to a local vaccination site to step up the pressure.

Again, as an information card alone, this is not all that significant on it’s own.

Alas, this does not occur in a vacuum; it comes along with lots of politicians, bureaucrats, and business brown-noses anxious to do everything they can to push more people into compliance and to cut out all those who refuse to take the shot. As such, the adoption of the new NC Vaccine Passport is something to watch very closely.