New York State officials announced on Friday afternoon that they are discontinuing their controversial mobile phone vaccine passport program, known as “Excelsior Pass,” citing “reduced demand for access to digital COVID-19 test and vaccine records.”
The Excelsior Pass program began in early 2021 with an estimated cost burden of $2.5 million. It later ballooned to a sum approaching one hundred times over the original budget, with an approximate amount of $250 million dollars being handed out to IBM, Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group.
Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group have billed New York taxpayers approximately $200 million for “marketing” and “buildout” costs associated with the program since 2021, while IBM has billed around $40 million plus $200,000 a month since 2021 in “data storage” fees, according to state records.
Under mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, the city enforced its “Key to NYC” vaccine passport program for over two years. The mobile application was a staple of New York City’s movement pass system, which was installed to prohibit entry to indoor facilities to those who refused to take the experimental genetic serums released by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson.
According to the Times Union, the taxpayer money that flowed to Excelsior Pass development “is now the subject of a state state inspector general’s investigation.”
This isn’t the first time that New York officials got into hot water over Covid related contracts. Last year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul awarded a personal megadonor supporter with over $600 million in no-bid “PPE” contracts.
While a handful of people in New York took action to protest against the authoritarian movement pass system, the vast majority of New Yorkers were happy to accommodate the biomedical tyranny. In NYC, virtually every business complied with the program, either out of sympathy or for fear of being shut down by the government.
The Excelsior Pass will no longer be available after July 28, 2023. That’s $250 million down the drain, and on to the next “crisis.”