2018 Talk of Vaccine Passports Does Not Suggest the Pandemic Was Planned
The Claim
Documents from a 2018 European Commission show plans for vaccine passports, proving that the pandemic was planned in advance.
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Emerging story
In early April, a range of articles appeared on several conspiracy theory websites with headlines such as “European Plans for ‘Vaccine Passports’ Were in Place 20 Months Prior to the Pandemic. Coincidence?” The articles attempted to claim that the coronavirus pandemic is either a hoax or was created by the government. They highlighted 2018 plans from the European Commission that discuss vaccine passports. Many have claimed that these plans are suspicious, as there was no coronavirus pandemic in 2018.
These articles have gained tens of thousands of views and hundreds of social media shares, according to some of the sites’ own metrics. Additionally, a range of people on social media have used the articles to support the theories that coronavirus is either a hoax or was government engineered:
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation has found no evidence in the articles’ source documents that the coronavirus pandemic was either a hoax or government planned.
One of the documents that these articles use to support their claims does come from the European Commission, which instigates and implements the European Union’s policies. The conspiracy articles claim that vaccine passport information is buried deep in the document. Instead, vaccine passports, or cards, as they are referred to in the document, are first mentioned on page three. The cards are mentioned along with suggestions about developing shared vaccination schedules across the EU. The source says that the European Commission has been considering the use of vaccination cards since at least the year 2009.
The document was compiled to address vaccine cooperation for a range of diseases that have existed long before the coronavirus, such as measles, diphtheria, and poliovirus. It also shows that vaccines and vaccine hesitancy are nothing new. In fact, the first vaccine was administered in 1796. Skepticism about vaccines is almost as old.
The second European Commission document cited by the conspiracy articles comes from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It is a timeline of plans for strengthening vaccine cooperation from the second quarter of 2019. An updated version is still available on the European Commission’s website, and is easy to find. The document is largely the same, only with minor updates. Neither version of these timelines supports the theory that the pandemic is either a hoax or government facilitated. Only one small section of the timelines concern a vaccination passport, and in both versions of the document, the deadline for the European Commission’s proposal for a vaccine passport is 2022. (Note that this deadline is a proposal for a vaccine passport, not the implementation of the vaccine passport.) This suggests that a vaccine passport was a long term goal of the European Commission and coronavirus was not created/hoaxed to facilitate its implementation.
