The rise of the Covid-industrial complex

The measures purportedly undertaken in response to the pandemic have accelerated the trend towards increasingly concentrated, oligarchical and authoritarian forms of capitalist power

I’m really excited to announce the publication of a great anthology which I had the pleasure of contributing to: COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear, edited by Elena Louisa Lange and Geoff Shullenberger. In it you’ll find an essay of mine titled “The rise of the Covid-industrial complex” (published below).

The book’s description is as follows:

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures introduced to purportedly contain its spread have wrought an unprecedented global social transformation.

Authoritarian measures such as lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the enforced wearing of facemasks, have led to a biopolitical disenfranchisement of human rights and the encroachment of state and corporate directives onto private lives. By supporting these measures, the left has lost sight of its traditional critique of capital, the state, and class society and has instead reinforced existing power structures in the name of “saving lives”. In doing so, the left has contributed to widespread suffering, especially among the “vulnerable” groups in society the measures claimed to protect, particularly children, the elderly, and the poor.

COVID-19 and the Left explores why the left has departed from its self-understanding as a critical force against state power, unfettered capital accumulation, the digital transformation, biopolitics, and a politics of social discrimination, and instead has largely assumed a stance in line with the neoliberal consensus. In particular, the essays in this collection explore the role of fear, panic, and psychological blackmailing as a tool of domination in late capitalist society and consider whether the left has been a victim, or an active perpetrator, of a “tyranny of fear”.

Drawing upon approaches from various disciplines and interrogating shibboleths on the left and right, the essays in this volume consider the ideological, sociocultural, and economic implications of the historical rupture that the COVID-19 pandemic presents and instead argue for a counter-narrative to fear and its harmful consequences. This provocative collection will be of considerable interest to those with an interest in the contemporary left and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, followers of mine will know that this is very much the analytical framework that informed the book by Toby Green and myself, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left.

In the essay of mine present in the anthology, I expand on some of the issues touched upon in the book, in particular the way in which the measures purportedly undertaken in response to the pandemic have accelerated the trend towards increasingly concentrated, oligarchical and authoritarian forms of capitalist power, leading to a fusion of state (and suprastate), corporate, media, and digital power that may very well come to be seen as the most toxic legacy of the pandemic, heralding the rise of the most powerful industrial complex the world has ever known. 

Here is the essay in question:

“The rise of the Covid-industrial complex” by Thomas Fazi

In his 1961 farewell address, the former World War II general and soon-to-be retired commander-in-chief Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” — that is, the “immense military establishment and […] large arms industry” that had emerged as a result of the war effort, but which hadn’t been dismantled in its wake, and was bound to become a permanent feature of American society, whose “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government” (National Archives 2022). “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”, Eisenhower cautioned. History would prove him right, as we know: if the US has been in a state of permanent warfare for the past sixty years, that’s largely a result of the “unwarranted influence” that the hugely lucrative military-industrial complex has come to exert over policymakers in Washington. 

Today we are witnessing the rise of a new industrial complex — just as dangerous, and potentially even more powerful. Over the course of the past three years, the pandemic — or more precisely, governments’ response to the latter — has not only claimed the lives of millions of people and upturned the lives of everyone else, particularly the poorest and weakest member of society, causing widespread psychological, social and economic devastation; it has also fundamentally altered the landscape of Western capitalism, dramatically accelerating pre-existing trends and heralding the rise of an even more concentrated, oligarchical and authoritarian capitalist mode of production, and therefore of power. 

On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly in the hospitality and high-street retail sectors, were forced to shut down — many of them for good. Indeed, several studies show that lockdowns led to high rates of permanent closures among SMEs, particularly small businesses, compared to much lower rates among large businesses, leading to a concentration of market share among the latter (Fairlie 2022). In the US, for example, by late 2021 there were almost 40 percent fewer small businesses open nationwide compared to early 2020 (Nichols 2021), and nearly two thirds of American small businesses were still earning less than half of their pre-pandemic monthly earnings, while only 50 percent of Canadian SMEs were open (Groves 2021). 

Since small and medium businesses account for 60 to 70 percent of employment, these massive — often permanent — closures triggered “one of the worst jobs crises since the Great Depression” (OECD 2021), which was only partially cushioned by government stimulus and the relief measures put in place — but not in every country. In 2020 alone, workers around the world cumulatively lost US$3.7 trillion in earnings — an 8.3 percent decline — according to a report from the International Labour Organization (ILO 2021). This translated into a sharp increase in global poverty (Mahler et al. 2021; World Bank Group 2021). By mid-2022, the incomes of 99 percent of humanity were still worse off compared to pre-pandemic projections, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) (Sánchez-Páramo et al. 2021), and unemployment was still higher than before the pandemic (Steverman and Curran 2022). 

Even across richer nations, the impacts of this labour crisis have been immense. A February 2022 report published by Caritas suggested that labour market inequalities had soared across Europe throughout the previous two years (Mc Mahon 2022). In Spain, a report from March 2022, two years after the onset of the pandemic, painted a devastating picture: the poorest households in Spain had lost 27 percent of their income, while the richest had lost just 6.8 percent (Vargas 2022). An additional 600,000 people were seeking help from food banks in 2021 compared to 2020 (Vargas 2022), and this impact endured throughout much of the year (Viejo 2021). The situation was similar across several developed nations. Meanwhile, global trillionaire wealth grew by US$4.4 trillion between 2020 and 2021, leading Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to write early in 2022 that “the pandemic’s most significant outcome will be a worsening of inequality”, both within developed nations and between developed and developing countries (Stiglitz 2022). Yet liberals like Stiglitz were apparently still unable to compute that it was not the pandemic itself that had caused this, but rather the unprecedented policy response to it, as demonstrated by those countries that refused to follow the global consensus on lockdowns. 

What, then, are some of the likely consequences of this massive accumulation of capital by a tiny number of people, expropriated from SME owners and the global working class? A dystopian, hyper-unequal future would appear to be emerging from the ashes of the pandemic — one in which not only is wealth and power more concentrated than ever in the hands of a small elite of individuals, but in which practically every sector of the economy is dominated by a small number of all-powerful mega-corporations. 

Indeed, this massive upward transfer of wealth — the largest in modern history in the shortest space of time — cannot be understood without taking into the account the way in which the pandemic response dramatically altered the geography of global, and especially Western, capitalism. Amidst the global pandemic, with small businesses crumbling and deep economic suffering across nations, a handful of mega-corporations — particularly in the Big Tech and Big Pharma sectors — made a killing. In 2020, it was reported that pharmaceutical and technology giants such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Merck were raking in hundreds of billions more in “pandemic super-profits” than over the previous the four-year average (Oxfam 2020). 

As far as the major tech companies are concerned — Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft, or GAMAM — their success is easily explained. As people found themselves stuck at home (or spending much more time indoors) for several months, as a result of lockdowns and the general climate of fear, they turned to the internet for pretty much everything — shopping, dining, working, schooling, entertainment, socialising, even sex. Meanwhile, any business that still had money to spend on marketing spent it on Google, Facebook or Amazon. The three tech giants already dominated the digital advertising sector going into 2020, but the pandemic pushed them into command of the entire advertising economy (Hagey and Vranica 2021). Companies might have cut back in other areas, but they couldn’t afford not to buy software from Microsoft and Amazon, as virtual meetings became the norm. 

In other words, what represented a curse for countless small and medium traditional businesses, represented a blessing for a few — already massive — corporations. In a perverse feedback loop, the growing power of technology made lockdown possible — and was then bolstered to previously unimaginable levels by lockdown itself. This was only partially a “natural” consequence of the lockdowns; to a large degree it was the result of a well-executed political-communicative agenda clearly aimed at exploiting the pandemic to introduce long-term societal changes. Indeed, just a few months into the pandemic, politicians in several countries were already talking of how this new hyper-digitalised, dematerialised reality was bound to become the “new normal”, even in the post-Covid era. 

For Big Tech, the super-profiteering continued well into 2021. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft collectively grew their profits by more than 50 percent compared to 2020, which had already been a record-breaking year, while sales grew 27 percent to a total that would make the companies a top-15 world economy (Poletti and Owens 2022). Collectively, the companies topped US$1.4 trillion in revenue — which would rank 13th in gross domestic product (GDP) as a nation, just behind Brazil and ahead of Australia, according to World Bank figures — and generated US$320 billion in profit. 

As the New York Times technology writer Shira Ovide commented in mid-2021: 

The pandemic has made the tech giants and their bosses unfathomably rich. (Even more unfathomably rich than they were before). Apple has so much extra cash that it’s spending an additional $90 billion to buy its own stock, nearly the equivalent of Kenya’s gross domestic product. […] I have seen a lot of bananas financial numbers, including from these five tech giants. But I promise you that Big Tech’s numbers are now so wild that I am running out of non-curse words to explain them (Ovide 2021). 

The other sector to have benefited enormously from the pandemic is, of course, Big Pharma. The companies behind the mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines most widely used in the West — Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna — also made mind-boggling profits in 2021. The case of Moderna is paradigmatic. Before 2020, the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company was virtually unknown, and had launched no products on the market. In 2019, it had posted less than US$50 million in revenue (and a negative net income) In 2021, its revenue had shot up by more than 6,000 percent to US$18 billion, of which US$13 billion were in pre-tax profits (Dearden 2022b)  — all on the back of a single product, its Spikevax Covid-19 vaccine.

That makes it possibly the most lucrative medicine of all time. These profits have turned some of Moderna’s investors into multi-billionaires. At one point during the pandemic, Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel, also a major shareholder, was worth over US$12 billion (Ponciano 2022), and while Moderna’s stock has been volatile, he was still worth US$5 billion at the time of writing. He’s not the only person involved in the vaccine to have become a billionaire practically overnight: the Moderna vaccine is said to have created at least another eight billionaires (Oxfam 2021). Even Moderna’s profits, however, pale in comparison to the astonishing US$37 billion made by Pfizer, of which US$22 billion in net profits, mostly from its Comirnaty Covid vaccine (Dearden 2022a; Kollewe 2022). Its partner company, BioNTech — another little known name before 2020, like Moderna — also reported a massive profit of US$11.5 billion, compared to just over US$15 million the previous year (Dunleavy 2022). 

So collectively Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna made combined profits of around US$45 billion in 2021 alone — more than US$1,000 every second. Expected profits for 2022 were even higher at the time of writing; in the first three quarters alone Pfizer posted profits of almost US$30 billion. This isn’t surprising if we consider the WHO’s and national governments’ stated aim of “vaccinating the entire world against Covid” (see, for example, Macron 2021), by whatever means necessary — at the time of writing, almost 70 percent of the global population (5.5 billion people) has received at least one dose (Our World in Data 2022); that in 2021 alone, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna collectively sold around 3 billion doses of vaccines (Dunleavy 2021); and that the three companies were selling the vaccines at a huge markup: respectively €/US$15-20 and €/US$18-25 per dose in the EU and US (these would later be hiked, compared to a production cost estimated to be between US$1 and US$3 per dose (Merelli 2022; Marriott and Maitland 2021). 

This is even more extraordinary if we consider that the development of the vaccines was largely publicly funded. Moderna benefited from more than US$4 billion from the US government (Abutaleb et al. 2020) and US$1 million from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) (Pharma Manufacturing 2020), which covered 100 percent of its research and development (R&D) costs and most of its manufacturing costs. Pfizer-BioNtech’s Comirnaty vaccine was also massively subsidised by public money: a US$1.95 billion supply contract with the US government (Lupkin 2020), a non-refundable down payment from the EU of €700 million (RAI 2022), a €375 million grant from the German government, and a €100 million loan from the European Investment Bank to accelerate its development. As the Swiss NGO Public Eye notes, the colossal amount of public funds the pharmaceutical companies benefited from “significantly, if not completely, de-risked their whole endeavour” (Public Eye 2021) — and all without attaching any strings to these billions in order to guarantee public benefit. 

This is better understood if we consider that some of these public funding operations were run directly by ex-employees of the giant pharmaceutical corporations themselves, through the revolving door framework. For instance, the man called to lead Operation Warp Speed — the US programme created to accelerate the development and manufacturing of Covid vaccines, which provided more than US$10 billion of public funding to a handful of pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) — was none other than Moncef Slaoui, former GSK executive (running its vaccines programme) and board member of Moderna. Following his nomination, Slaoui was required to resign from a number of biotech boards funded by Operation Warp Speed, and to sell his Moderna stock, but was allowed to keep his stock in GSK, reported to be worth about US$10 million (Rowland 2020). 

Western governments didn’t limit themselves to funding the vaccines, of course. They then fast-tracked the regulatory approval process (on the basis, it would later emerge, of poor clinical trial data) (Thacker 2021), committed to purchasing billions of doses through contracts that were largely kept secret (EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose husband works for a US biotech company, notably negotiated its biggest deal with Pfizer, for up to 1.8 billion doses, via a series of text messages with the company’s boss) (Rankin 2022), granted manufacturers close-to-full immunity from liability over a whole host of issues (Guarascio 2020; Public Health Emergency 2022), and allowed the pharma companies to fully own the patents and thus to employ a completely pro-profit business model, meaning that it would be entirely up to them to decide how and where the vaccines would get manufactured and, most importantly, as we have seen, how much they would cost. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting example of socialisation of the (huge) costs and privatisation of the (even bigger) profits. It goes without saying that the pharma companies’ profits would have been a fraction of what they have been if governments and global institutions hadn’t then launched campaigns of compelled — and in places mandatory — mass vaccination, often accompanied by the introduction of highly coercive and discriminatory measures such as vaccine passports and lockdowns targeted against the unvaccinated. 

This was motivated not by scientific evidence — as has since become apparent, for example in the admission that vaccines were known not to prevent transmission (Fox News 2022)  — but by a profit-driven agenda: allowing the vaccine makers to pursue a for-profit strategy clearly offered these incredibly powerful corporations, capable of exercising a huge influence over national governments and supranational institutions, a perverse incentive to vaccinate as many people as possible in high-income, high-paying countries, by any means necessary, regardless of the consequences or actual benefits. To get an idea of the scale of the operation, by mid-2022 the European Union alone had secured more than 4 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines (European Commission 2022) — more than ten doses for each European citizen. In other words, just like the massive growth of the tech sector was made possible by the government-mandated lockdowns, the equally massive growth of these pharmaceutical and biotech companies would not have been possible without the government-mandated policies of mass vaccination policies. This highlights the fact that the kind of corporatocratic capitalism that has been entrenched by the pandemic is not a system in which governments disappear, but rather it is one that relies on increasingly powerful and authoritarian state apparatuses intervening to further the interests of big capital. So clearly the way state institutions have been captured by corporate and private interests throughout the neoliberal era is an important part of this story. 

Full-spectrum information dominance 

The capture of state institutions by corporations, however, goes only so far in explaining the governments’ support for these policies. In using the “public health emergency” to sweep aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarise societies, crack down on civil liberties, and implement unprecedented measures of social control, governments were also pursuing their own goals. Ultimately, it is hard to tell who is really calling the shots — the government, the security, intelligence and administrative agencies that make up the so-called “deep state”, or the corporations. The question is perhaps more important than the answer, because it points to a complete dissolution of the boundaries between government and corporate interests. This becomes apparent when we consider the way state and suprastate institutions, and even pharmaceutical companies themselves, colluded with Big Tech to censor and suppress dissenting voices on social media. 

The way in which social networks have relentlessly policed the debate over the past three years is far too obvious — by restricting access to content, requiring users to take down content, censoring and even “deplatforming” critical voices or opinions, no matter how qualified or scientifically solid, or by delegitimizing the latter by referring to “independent fact-checkers” of dubious reliability; imposing labels that required click-through to access content, and so on. 

However, what is less obvious is the extent to which this was part of a coordinated effort involving the world’s most powerful governments and institutions. In February 2020, weeks before the pandemic was even declared, the World Health Organization (WHO) deemed the situation an “infodemic”. “Our greatest enemy to date is not the virus itself. It’s rumours, fear and stigma”, claimed Director-General Ghebreyesus (Ghebreyesus 2020). For this reason, he said, the WHO would begin “working with search and media companies like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Tencent, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and others to counter the spread of rumours and misinformation”.  Wikipedia was subsequently brought on board as well. Over the course of the coming weeks and months, the WHO went on to establish a vast global communications strategy to remove “Covid disinformation” from the media and the internet. However, it soon became clear that the aim of this strategy wasn’t to protect the public from inaccurate and potentially dangerous information (which was certainly widespread) but simply to censor any voice or opinion that that didn’t chime with the official narrative, even at the cost of exposing the public to officially sanctioned misinformation and disinformation. Plausible hypotheses about the origins of the virus were suppressed, eminent figures trying to bring nuance to the discussion were censored. At the same time, the authorities permitted the rapid circulation of false claims about the virus’s mortality rate, overconfident assertions of its “natural origin”, and subsequently debunked assertions about vaccines being 100 percent effective or halting viral spread. 

The result was the emergence of a totalising narrative. The Covid crisis thus gave rise to an international process of editorial standardisation aimed at ensuring what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the monopoly of legitimate information” (Bourdieu 1996, p. 82). As the French researcher Laurent Mucchielli notes, this was “a historically unprecedented attempt at global information control” (Mucchielli 2020), as billions of people throughout the world and across several countries were exposed, for the first time in history, to a single overarching narrative sanctioned by a single supranational organisation — the World Health Organization. However, individual governments, and even the pharmaceutical companies themselves, were no less active in micromanaging the online Covid information flow. In the US, various lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and leaks have begun to shed light on the shocking collusion between the Biden administration, Big Pharma and Big Tech throughout the pandemic. Many suspected that some coordination between social media companies and the federal government was occurring, but the breadth, depth, and coordination of this apparatus is far beyond what virtually anyone imagined. 

One such lawsuit was filed in May 2022 by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general against president Biden and other top-ranking Biden administration officials (Supreme Court of the United States 2022). They were subsequently joined by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), representing renowned epidemiologists Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, two of three signers of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration — the target of an aggressive smear campaign — as well as others. At the time of writing (November 2022), the lawsuit is still underway; however, the plaintiffs claim to have identified “a vast censorship army”, implicating more than 80 federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies, including Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Homeland Security (DHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDS), Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Much of the censorship was related to alleged “misinformation and disinformation” — now officially considered a form of “domestic terrorism” (National Security Council 2021) — about pandemic lockdowns, vaccines and Covid-19 which proved over time to be correct. Internal DHS memos, emails, and documents obtained by The Intercept confirmed that the US government used its power to shape online discourse, enlisting social media platforms in flagging and censoring posts that conflicted with the official narrative (Klippenstein and Fang 2022). It has been described as potentially “the most serious, coordinated, and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal government’s executive branch in US history” (Kheriaty 2022). 

Even more disturbingly, social media platforms were not getting their cues just from the WHO and national governments — but also from the vaccine makers themselves. Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, a strong critic of  Covid orthodoxy, was “permanently” banned from Twitter in August 2021 for “repeated violations” of the platform’s Covid rules. Berenson decided to sue Twitter, demanding reinstatement, and in the summer of 2022, his account was restored. Upon further review, Twitter acknowledged that Berenson’s tweets should not have led to his suspension. Berenson’s legal team, however, unearthed internal Twitter documents and Slack conversations showing that in August 2021, Scott Gottlieb — a former head of the FDA who has been serving on the Pfizer board since 2019, to the tune of almost $400,000 a year — wrote to Twitter, complaining about several tweets in which Berenson called Fauci “arrogant” and a “skilled courtier” (Berenson 2022). Four days after Gottlieb sent the email, Twitter banned Berenson. 

Intra-corporate consolidation 

This highlights another disturbing feature of the current corporatocratic trend: the growing consolidation not only within, but also between, sectors. This becomes evident when we look at the investment funds that actually “own” these corporations. BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest asset management firms in the world, respectively managing US$10 and US$8 trillion. That is 3.7 and 3 times more than the UK’s annual GDP. At the time of writing, these two funds are the top “owners” of several major Big Pharma (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck), Big Tech (Facebook, Twitter) and Big Media (New York Times, Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, News Corp) corporations. A 2017 paper claimed that BlackRock and Vanguard had ownership in some 1,600 American firms (Fichtner et al. 2017). If we add the then third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompassed nearly 90 percent of all S&P 500 firms, with the three mega-funds being the largest shareholders in 40 percent of all publicly listed firms in the United States. That number is likely to be even higher today. Even more worrying is the fact that “[d]espite having shareholdings of ‘only’ 5-7 percent, there is growing evidence that institutional investors such as BlackRock and Vanguard engage in active discussions with company management and boards with a view to influence companies’ long-term 14 strategies”, as a more recent paper shows (Banal-Estañol, A. et al. 2020). 

Yet, these funds also coordinate among themselves. When analysing the voting behaviour of the two funds, researchers found that they coordinate it through centralised corporate governance departments (Fichtner et al. 2017). This is hardly surprising if we consider that BlackRock and Vanguard are also each other’s main institutional investors: in other words, they “own” each other. This means that we are effectively in the presence of a single super-entity that “owns” and controls a huge chunk of the Western economy. While this was already the case before the pandemic, the latter has accelerated this trend, and more importantly has brought to the surface the way in which these funds, through their cross-sector corporate control, can “harmonise” these companies’ behaviour to further their interests. This is evident in the case of online censorship of non-aligned opinions during the pandemic, when we consider that the companies selling the vaccine (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson), the media outlets shaping the mainstream vaccine narrative and the social media platforms enforcing that narrative are, to a large degree, “owned” and controlled by the same two funds: BlackRock and Vanguard, which, incidentally, are raking in billions from the vaccines (Willems 2021). 

This harmonisation among sectors (and between the latter and governments) is deeply troubling, and points to the rise of a new ultra-powerful complex — the techno-media-pharma (TMP) complex. This is evident also in increased cross-breeding and interpenetration between these sectors. Take Google’s growing investments in the health, pharmaceutical and pandemic-prevention sectors, for example (Glasner 2021). Or the field of biotechnology more in general, based on a combination of pharma, AI and machine learning. As mentioned, none of this would be possible without the active support of governments, which use their unlimited financial power to create an enabling environment that rewards the participants in the TMP complex. The US offers numerous other examples of this blurring of the boundaries between the corporate and political spheres. Obama was very close to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who later became a close collaborator of the Pentagon in developing military applications of AI. Today, Biden’s economic policies are heavily influenced by the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, a former BlackRock executive. Biden also got Robert Cardiff — senior advisory for Verily Life and Google Health, the biotech and healthcare subsidiaries of Google, and a huge Big Pharma stockholder — nominated as the new chief of the FDA. And this is not to mention the influence corporations and “philanthrocapitalists”, such as Bill Gates, have on international organisations such as the UN and WHO (Greenstein and Loffredo 2020). 

This fusion of state (and suprastate), corporate, media, and digital power may very well come to be seen as the most toxic legacy of the pandemic, giving rise to the most powerful industrial complex the world has ever known — so powerful that its ability to manipulate human perception and behaviour on a virtually global scale is almost boundless. This techno-media-pharma complex — and the financial cosmocrats behind it — can definitely be expected to exercise an “unwarranted influence” over policy in the years to come. The “disastrous rise of misplaced power”, to quote Eisenhower, is not a possibility but a reality — one which the pandemic has all too dramatically demonstrated. 

The rise of the biosecurity state 

Indeed, many of the supposedly “emergency measures” implemented under the guise of “fighting the virus” are already in the process of being normalised, even as the pandemic era gives way to the era of Covid endemicity. As authentication and surveillance technologies such as vaccine passports and track-and-trace apps were rolled out during the pandemic, civil rights organisations, authors and activists warned that governments would not be likely to be willing to abandon the new control and surveillance opportunities these technologies offered, and may be tempted to use them for unanticipated ends, ushering in a new era of normalised state surveillance. As Edward Snowden noted: “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky. The emergency tends to be expanded” (YouTube 2022). 

Such concerns were dismissed as groundless conspiracy theories. And yet, as many dissenting opinions raised during the pandemic, they are being validated by events. Following the November 2022 G20 meeting in Bali, the leaders of the world’s largest economies issued a joint declaration promoting a global standard on proof of vaccination for international travel and calling for the establishment of a global vaccine passport and digital health ID scheme. The statement reads: 

We acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods […] to facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations. We support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks as part of the efforts to strengthen prevention and response to future pandemics, that should capitalize and build on the success of the existing standards and digital Covid-19 certificates (White House 2022). 

The joint declaration follows recommendations from Indonesia’s Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin made during a Business 20 (B20) panel held ahead of the G20 summit: “Let’s have a digital health certificate acknowledged by [the] WHO — if you have been vaccinated or tested properly, then you can move around”, Sadikin said (Fazi and Green 2022). The G20’s statement also suggested that the WHO should be given legally binding powers to implement such measures in the future. This is exactly the “new normal” that many had warned about: one in which access to social life and the enjoyment of basic human rights, such as the right to freedom of movement, within as well as between countries, would become linked to the positive scanning of a digital ID containing all manner of personal data, based upon the meeting of a set of requirements — not just vaccination status, but, potentially, residency, credit and job status, etc. As Kevin Bardosh, Alex de Figueiredo and other researchers had written in BMJ Global Health: 

Having set these population-wide passport precedents, it is conceivable that they could be expanded in the near future to include other personal health data including genetic tests and mental health records, which would create additional rights violations and discrimination based on biological status for employers, law enforcement, insurance companies, governments and tech companies (Bardosh et al. 2022). 

Indeed, tech companies and international organisations such as the World Bank and World Economic Forum have long been promoting biometrics-based digital identity and health wallets — “digital passports” assigned to each citizen at birth and containing the person’s demographic, biometric, and health data (and potentially any other type of data). As the WEF noted in a 2018 report, this digital identity would one day “determine what products, services and information we can access — or, conversely, what is closed off to us” (World Economic Forum 2018). To this end, initiatives and institutes such as ID2020 | Digital Identity Alliance, the Commons Project, and the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) were established. 

In 2019 — months before the Covid-19 pandemic began — ID2020, an American nongovernmental organisation with a mission to guide the development of global digital ID, said that immunity certificates could be used as a gateway to establish digital identity. “ID2020 Alliance partners envision a world in which all people can collect verifiable digital credentials — immunization records, vocational training certificates, proof of residency — and selectively share these records to apply for jobs, access financial services, participate as citizens and voters, and more”, the organisation noted in an overview of its purpose (ID2020 2021). As the German economist Norbert Häring writes: “This would have the — entirely intended — side effect of turning Silicon Valley platform corporations into world passport authorities” (Häring 2021). 

It is no secret that the institutions and tech companies promoting digital IDs saw Covid passports as the precursors to much more wide-ranging instruments. As one tech analyst put it: “By restricting and changing the shape of human interaction for over a year, the Covid-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated the digitalization of many services and, in doing so, reinvigorated efforts to establish a cross-contextual digital identity infrastructure” (Ho 2021). Another wrote that “[m]obile digital identity technology and infrastructure have been dramatically advanced by digital health passes, which provide the foundations of identity verification and linkage to credentials that can underpin mobile identity wallets” (Burt 2020). 

Projects of this kind are already underway in countries such as India. Meanwhile, in June 2021, the EU proposed a framework for a European Digital Identity, one of the largest digital identity projects ever (European Commission 2021). As Thales, one of the largest international defence contractors, noted approvingly: “The ambition is huge; both in terms of scale — as it applies to all EU member states — and also in the power it would grant to citizens throughout the bloc. For the first time, citizens would be able to use a European Digital Identity wallet, from their phone, that would give them access to services in any region across Europe” (Thales 2022). 

The idea of a digital ID that “gives you access to services” is worrying because it implies that your right to access the services in question could be “switched off” at any moment. This is not some dystopian hypothetical scenario — this is exactly the fate that befell millions of people, in several countries, who were denied access to a whole range of public spaces and services on the basis of their unvaccinated status. A glimpse into what this may mean for the future was offered in June 2022, when a protest planned by hundreds of bank depositors in central China seeking access to their frozen funds was thwarted when authorities turned their health code apps red, several depositors told Reuters, also making it impossible for them to travel (Tham 2022). 

Once again, we see the merging of government and corporate interests. On the one hand, the degree of social control offered by digital IDs clearly fits in well with the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of post-pandemic capitalism, even in (formerly) liberal-democratic countries; on the other hand, they offer extraordinary opportunities for profit for biotech companies. Ultimately, digital IDs remind us that it is pointless to look for a single overarching explanation for policies that emerge from a complex nexus of overlapping economic and political interests. 

What is clear is the terrifying reality that is already emerging from such a nexus of interests — one in which an all-powerful cosmocratic elite, beyond and above any form of democratic control and accountability, is in a position to shape and control almost every aspect of our lives. This future is not inevitable. But an unprecedented collective effort will be needed to fight for a different future. 

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