Coronavirus Lockdown: ‘Herd’ today - A Nazi idea is making a comeback

The Digital Alarmist

While the coronavirus rages on, perhaps you are one of the lucky few teleworking from home, providing an ‘essential’ service to society. Every now and then you glance at your smartphone to see if anyone has texted you, especially the pizza delivery guy. Another ‘lucky’ soul. He is making his rounds, risking life and limb, delivering food, medicine or whatever people have ordered from the relative safety of their homes. You are both thanking your stars (or whatever deities you subscribe to) for the internet.

You don’t like to be quarantined and find the minimum 6-foot ‘social distancing’ requirement a huge burden. Guess what, you have had a lot of practice doing both, long before the coronavirus swept the globe. How so, you ask. The answer lies in the many viruses, some of them very old, that have been infecting you. A dangerous new one is coming to your area, but more on that later in the article.

Through incessant texting, playing online games and watching endless movies being streamed on the tiny screen of your smartphone, you knew how to self-quarantine. The walled community you live in has allowed you to practice social distancing quite successfully. The wall can be a physical one (Berlin or Trump models instantly come to mind), but mostly it is a virtual one, constructed by bricks drawn from just one pile or a mix-and-match of several piles of highly infectious material -- race, religion, caste, wealth, nationality, ignorance, greed, power, ideologies, etc. The same material, the same age-old fault lines responsible for numerous internecine conflicts, especially wars.

While scientists are still not sure whether the new coronavirus has more than one strain, the viruses I am talking about are all non-biological in nature and have many strains. Here is an incomplete list – viral-inequality, viral-bigotry, viral-censorship, viral-misinformation, viral-missing information, viral-surveillance, and viral-authoritarianism.

Have you heard of the newest virus that is starting to propagate? Labelled ‘herd immunity,’ it is predicated on opening up the economy as quickly as possible. This viral idea has a biological component and several non-biological components.

The biological component consists of immunising a targeted subset of the population by injecting them with non-lethal doses of viral material taken from coronavirus-infected individuals, thereby allowing the immunised individuals to resume their normal lives without fear of contracting the COVID-19 disease. This is reminiscent of how people were protected from smallpox until smallpox was eradicated in the latter half of the 20th century. It would not surprise me one bit if the same old fault lines are used in selecting the target subset.

The herd immunity approach to combating the coronavirus, as proposed in the US and the UK, involves the following steps. Test a subset of some population and break it down into two groups – uninfected and infected. Immunise the uninfected group and issue them ‘immunity passports’ allowing unrestricted movement. Track every member of the infected group to establish who they come in contact with through cellphone records, facial recognition, CCTV, shopping details, social media postings, protected health records and government databases. Analyse the data down to the minutest detail so as to track the spread of the virus, track people violating quarantine orders, build better pandemic models, and notify people who might possibly get infected due to being in the proximity of infected individuals.

It is the non-biological components of the virus that I find interesting, and troubling -- troubling because it is rooted in Nazi ideology, and interesting because it involves almost every aspect of information technology and biotechnology. You may want to learn more about programmes and tools such as ‘Data for Good’ and ‘Social Connectedness Index’. You may also wish to look upon the rich literature on notions of genetic purity and apartheid as practised in South Africa, America’s Deep South and elsewhere.

The immunity passport-holders will be the new ‘chosen’ people with many privileges conferred upon them, and those without such passports will pay the price. Unlike the old ‘chosen’ people, whose passports were merely tattoos which guaranteed them one-way passages to concentration camps and places beyond.

The immunity passport that is being contemplated has much in common with the ‘yellow card’, an international certification of vaccination and prophylaxis required for travel to certain parts of the world. There is a major difference though – the former is intended for travel within a country.

War, technology and viruses have been in bed together for a long time.

Missiles in exchange for HCQ to fight the pandemic? A far better deal if a handful of H1-B visas had been thrown in, perhaps? It would have made some people very happy.