Digital ID, vaccination certificates and the cashless argument: what was actually proposed in 2020
Three real things and the story that was built from them. The certificates were real, the research was real, the cashless preference was real. The tattoo that let you into a stadium was not.
In the spring of 2020 a set of remarks by Bill Gates travelled further and faster than almost anything else said about the pandemic. Videos of the interviews were cut, recut and in some cases removed, which convinced many people that something was being hidden. A great deal was written on this site and elsewhere joining the remarks to a research project the Gates Foundation funded and to Gates’s long-standing enthusiasm for digital payment. This page keeps the subject and sets out, as plainly as the record allows, what was actually said, what the research actually was, and what came of it.
What Gates said
In interviews in late March and April 2020, including a widely shared conversation on a public-affairs programme and a written Q&A on Reddit, Gates argued that large public gatherings would not return until there was mass vaccination, and that “eventually” there would need to be “certificates of who’s a recovered person and who’s a vaccinated person”, because countries would not want to block travel entirely from places where the virus was uncontrolled. He used the phrase “digital certificate”. He did not describe an implant, a tattoo or a payment system.
The remark was a forecast, not a policy; Gates held no office. But it was a forecast from the largest private funder of vaccination programmes in the world, made while every government was deciding how to reopen, and it was heard as a plan. Attorney General William Barr was asked about digital vaccination tracking on television and said it made him uneasy. Anthony Fauci said “immunity certificates” were being discussed. Congressman Ron Paul denounced the idea. Within weeks the phrase “immunity passport” was mainstream.
What the research was
The second real thing was a paper published in December 2019 in Science Translational Medicine by a group at MIT, with funding from the Gates Foundation. The researchers had developed a dye of copper-based quantum dots that could be delivered under the skin with a microneedle patch at the same time as a vaccine, invisible to the eye and readable with a modified smartphone camera for about five years. The purpose, stated in the paper and by Rice University’s summary of it, was to give clinics in countries with poor record-keeping a way to know which child had received which vaccine. It was a proof of concept in rats. The Foundation told PolitiFact it was not related to the coronavirus and that any government “could elect” to use such a tool in an immunisation programme.
That is the whole of it: a record of vaccination, stored in a pattern of dye, readable by a phone. Not an identity number, not a payment credential, not a condition of entry to anything. The distance between the paper and the story of a mandatory digital tattoo was covered by the word “could”.
The cashless argument
The third real thing was older and, for this site, the point. Gates had said since the 1990s that digital money would replace cash, and the Foundation’s development work included digital identity and mobile-money schemes in Africa and South Asia. The argument made here in 2020 was that a global health emergency was the plausible route by which a cashless system with a universal digital identity would arrive: a credential introduced for one purpose, proof of vaccination, that would be too useful for other purposes, payment, log-in, access, to stay limited to it. A number is a number, and the information attached to it lives in a database that can be changed.
That argument does not depend on Gates at all. It is an argument about how credentials expand, and it can be judged on its own terms.
What came of it
The European Union introduced its Digital COVID Certificate in July 2021: a QR code, on paper or on a phone, recording vaccination, recovery or a negative test, used for travel between member states and in several countries for entry to venues. Israel’s Green Pass, France’s pass sanitaire and New York’s Excelsior Pass did similar work. All were withdrawn or lapsed during 2022 and 2023 as the emergency ended. None used dye, tattoos or implants, and none was linked to payment.
So the forecast was right about the certificates and wrong about their permanence, and the story built around the research was wrong about its nature. What survived the episode was a demonstration that a large share of the public, in every country, would carry a digital credential to enter a restaurant if asked, and would stop the day the asking stopped. Whether that is reassuring depends on which half of the sentence one weighs.
Later note. The quantum-dot dye did not proceed to human trials in the following years. Central-bank digital currency, the other strand of the cashless argument, is covered in the money of the apocalypse.