By AFP Staff
On April 10, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a White House advisor and the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that federal authorities are looking at issuing “certificates of immunity” to citizens, who have recovered from the novel coronavirus known as covid-19, before allowing them back into the world at large to travel or conduct business.
During an interview on CNN, host Alisyn Camerota asked Fauci, “Can you imagine a time where Americans carry certificates of immunity?”
He responded: “You know, that’s possible.”
He added, “It’s one of those things that we talk about when we want to make sure that we know who the vulnerable people are and not. . . . This is something that’s being discussed. I think it might actually have some merit, under certain circumstances.”
The shocking notion of certain Americans being barred from leaving their homes or being limited in their ability to travel because they lack some form of identification or, even worse, a tattoo or an armband signaling that they have survived covid-19 and have immunity to the virus is something all Americans should reject.
Fauci said the designation would be based on tests for antibodies in individuals. The antibodies would show that a person has survived the virus and now has built up some immunity to it.
“If their antibody test is positive, one can formulate strategies about whether or not they would be at risk or vulnerable to getting re-infected,” Fauci said.
U.S. officials are not the only authorities looking at this dangerous proposal.
Politico reported that officials in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy have also discussed it.
So far, in the United States, testing for the coronavirus has been prone to serious problems due to limited supplies of test kits. Some doctors have even claimed that the current testing kits developed in the U.S. are unreliable with nearly 30% of tests coming back as “false negatives,” meaning the tests failed to detect the virus in people who are actually infected.
Fauci said that he expects testing to ramp up in the coming months in the United States.
“Within a period of a week or so, we’re going to have a rather large number of tests that are available” to the public, he added.
Not surprisingly, authoritarian China already has a system in place to track people who have recovered from the virus.
According to Politico, for several months now Chinese citizens have been required to display colored codes on their smartphones that indicate their risk of catching the virus.
The question for Americans is, would they really accept such a draconian proposal?
The saddest part of this is that most people today would embrace this wholly unAmerican mandate despite the fact that the country was founded on the notion that the individual is imbued with inalienable rights that protect his right to life and—of equal importance—liberty—whether or not a global pandemic has spread around the world.
