The evil span of the Wuhan Flu - contact tracing.


Contact tracing: the next authoritarian frontier
May 24, 2020
By Carol Brown

Oh, joy! “Contact tracing” is ramping up.

Under the guise of concern for public health, contact tracing allows the left to continue their totalitarian advance, as the federal government leaves it up to states to develop these intrusive measures

Contact tracing + tech overlords = We are tracking your every move, we know where you are, and we will deliver tyranny to your front door.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s start with Michigan. Red State reports:

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…When a person tests positive for the Wuhan virus the state wants to begin gathering personal information — not from those infected, but those in their personal orbit. Then the government will start reaching out to those individuals, compelling them to take shelter and self-quarantine. [snip]

Anyone who has tested positive will be asked by officials to provide a list of all the people they had been in close contact with two days prior to them experiencing any symptoms. The citizens will be contacted and urged to self-quarantine for 2 weeks. Following this a Contact Tracer will continue to check in during this quarantine period….

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Whitmer noted that it’s critical that people answer their phone for this to work and so you can be informed that you’ve had contact with someone who’s had contact with someone who’s had contact with someone’s who’s infected. But my guess is that if you don’t answer your phone, given what we’ve seen these past couple of months, they’ll come to your house.

In the state of Washington, Governor Inslee plans to hire 1500 contact tracers to enforce state control. Until they’re hired, he’ll use the National Guard, among others, to fill this role. The Hill reports:

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In Washington, when someone tests positive for COVID-19…an interviewer will reach out by phone. They will ask who that person has been in close contact with, then reach out to those other people to let them know they have been exposed. Those people would need to isolate or quarantine themselves, but there will be no enforcement.

Inslee will also require restaurants, once they are allowed to reopen, to "create a daily log of customers and maintain that daily log for 30 days, including telephone/email contact information, and time in," to make it easier for contact tracers…

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When asked about logistics, such as if people placed under immediate quarantine don’t have enough food in the house, Inslee stated:

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“We will have attached to the families a family support person who will check in with them to see what they need on a daily basis… and help them. If they can’t get a friend to do their grocery shopping, we will help get them groceries in some fashion. If they need pharmaceuticals to be picked up, we will make sure they get their pharmaceuticals… That’s going to help encourage them to maintain their isolation too.

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In other words, we’re the government and we’re here to help!

On the opposite coast, Massachusetts has contracted with a group to do contact tracing that’s funded by Soros, Gates and that has Chelsea Clinton on the board.

Well if all of this doesn’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy, I don’t know what would.

Maybe this: Big tech is pulling out all the stops to help states implement and enforce contact tracing. Facial recognition tools. Check. Apple and Google teaming up to track your location. Check. Chinese style surveillance systems that monitor your every step and your health in order to assign a personal COVID risk score. Check. China spying on our movement. Check.

This entire affair should be deeply concerning for all Americans. Among other things, it’s rife with potential for abuse (and that’s assuming one thinks this entire ordeal is acceptable even if it’s not abused). Since the state won’t tell you how they came to you in the first place, it would be easy to target certain individuals who we can call, for the sake of argument, enemies of the state.

That aside, even if this wasn’t abused (highly doubtful), it’s absurd. I have a radical idea to propose and I’m not even an “expert!”

How about we protect the most vulnerable in nursing homes – something most blue state governors failed to do? How about we let those in vulnerable demographics take responsibility for their level of risk? And how about we let everyone else go about their daily lives?

Opening up the economy won’t solve this deeper problem of fascists on the move infiltrating every aspect of our lives. Civil disobedience may be our only way out – a topic for another day.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/202...n_frontier.html



Michelle Malkin: Cashing In On Contact Tracing
05/27/2020

Look out. An "army of contact tracers" is about to be unleashed on America. Corporations, political lobbyists and government bureaucracies all win. Privacy, freedom and family autonomy all lose. Big time.

You may have already heard of the aptly named House Bill 6666, sponsored by Illinois Dem. Bobby Rush. Known as the Testing, Reaching and Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act, the legislation would allocate $100 billion in public funding to "eligible entities" to "conduct diagnostic testing for COVID-19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals' residences, and for other purposes." The cash could be used to hunt down infected individuals, quarantine them in their homes for undefined periods under unknown conditions and subsidize a hiring spree of untold thousands of trackers from nonprofits, schools and medical facilities.

As for "other purposes," the proposal does not define them—leaving Swamp public health bureaucrats and their pet grantees' imaginations to run wild. What recourse or appeals process do citizens have when the "experts" get diagnoses and assessments wrong? Or when, say, homeschool families refuse to submit to intrusive phone call monitoring or forced quarantine? What are the opt-in or opt-out mechanisms? H.R. 6666 is silent on all these fundamental issues of autonomy and sovereignty. Feel safer yet?

This federally supported surveillance-state bonanza comes on top of the $631 million in Centers for Disease Control funding for contact tracing already in the pipeline after the passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, plus another $75 billion in proposed contact-tracing spending embedded in the House Democrats' supplemental stimulus bill known as the HEROES Act.

Who benefits? Let's take one prominent entrant into the "digital transformation services" arena: a company called MTX. Founded in Albany, New York, and now based in Frisco, Texas, the small software company is raking in hundreds of millions of tax dollars to construct "virtual call centers" of 25,000 COVID data-mining agents. In Chicago, MTX has partnered with Google to create an app so residents can "pre-register" for the vaunted coronavirus vaccine and receive alerts on treatments and testing. In Georgia, the company nailed a five-year government contract for a new online contact-tracing platform. In New York and Massachusetts, MTX's mission has spread to monitoring jobless claims and child care facilities.

Lynn Davenport, a Texas public school mom and student privacy activist, reports that MTX is "also donating its newly launched tracking application to all public school districts in the U.S." Generous... or opportunist? As Davenport and other education technology watchdogs who have documented the proliferation of billions of dollars in invasive student data-mining schemes often remind us: "When it's free, YOU (and your children) are the product." Never forget: The price of "free" apps is access to your kids' search engine queries, website and video browsing, and undoubtedly just around the corner: their temperature, weight and mental health.

Contact tracing makes sense for some types of infectious disease epidemics. But with something as widespread as COVID-19, with possibly hundreds of millions of asymptomatic people, it amounts to yet another cost-ineffective, virtue-signaling boondoggle.

Sure, they tell us our privacy is guaranteed. Medical privacy is sacrosanct in America, right? But did you know that the U.S. Health and Human Services has quietly relaxed Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act data security and privacy requirements for pandemic testing sites, which will allow Big Pharma interests and other business interests to access previously protected personal health information?

Nothing to see here; move along.

If you do try to see and know more, good luck. Houston Chronicle reporters tried to shed sunlight on MTX's deal with top Texas GOP officials and were lucky to obtain a heavily redacted copy of the company's $295 million contract (paid with your money and mine). You know that creepy phrase "Operation Warp Speed" being used to ram a COVID vaccine through expedited, short-circuited clinical trials? Well, the same phrase applies to the adoption of these high-stakes contracts. Both anti-establishment Republicans and Trump-skeptical Democrats in Texas have raised red flags about the failure by Gov. Greg Abbott to provide advance notice to the state legislature of the enormous deal. The state took a hasty two days to approve MTX's proposal after putting the project out for bid.

The scheme was rolled out in just a little over two weeks. Who greased the wheels? Follow the money, of course.

The Houston Chronicle revealed that "The deal appears to have been put together within just a few days... MTX hired Austin-based lobbyists Andrea and Dean McWilliams for up to $50,000 each, according to public disclosure documents." The McWilliamses are the Matt and Mercedes Schlapp of Texas—consummate insiders and six-figure Bush bundlers looking out for their corporate clients over our constitutional rights and medical freedom. Not coincidentally, MTX reflects the "America last" values of the open borders Bush empire. The firm runs a "development center" out of offshore outsourcing hub Hyderabad, India, and CEO Das Nobel aspires to lead a "diverse" "billion-dollar-company" from which he hopes to "advance our culture initiatives."

Where's our protection from the globalism virus?

https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malk...contact-tracing


More info on contract tracing:
https://vimeo.com/421657568