Global vaccine database?

"Of all tyrannies," wrote C.S. Lewis, "a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."

In January, a former British Prime Minister called upon world leaders in Davos, drawn from business, economics and politics, to move us closer to the latter condition. 

Tony Blair urged them to take a collective step closer to global governance. 

He argued that world leaders needed to take steps to prepare for potential future pandemics, by setting up a global digital database of the vaccinated. And by extension, of course, the unvaccinated.

The subtext was that global digital infrastructure would be needed in other areas, too, so we'd better get on with building it.

What Mr Blair did not address were the huge potential downsides to global databases, in terms of privacy invasion, discrimination, technology creep and so much more.

In the next year or two, we will hear increasing calls for global digital infrastructure of one kind or another. 

Advocates will speak of hubs of interconnected databases, which can identify individuals and people groups according to their life circumstances - and potentially their belief systems and behaviour patterns.

Supposedly, this will allow governments and transnational treaty organisations to better prepare for worldwide challenges. 

These might include regional wars which have the potential to go nuclear; low-probability, high-impact events such as natural disasters; threats of genocide; and coordinated digital crime waves involving people trafficking and threats to the global economy. 

Mr Blair, like, I suppose most WEF attendees, is a keen internationalist and globalist. 

He believes - mistakenly, I think - that by hugely increasing levels of central oversight and, in the process, reducing personal privacy, governments can coax people into obeying their mandates.