ESC Adopts RFID Technology for UHC, 2045 CE

By the middle of the 23rd century, global society's interests in individual privacy had given way to the efficiency arguments of universal health care. The pandemics of the late 21st and 22nd centuries had killed hundreds of millions, and the political landscape of health care had changed ... dramatically. The UN's Charter of Human Rights was no longer relevant. Humanity—the species—had to come first, and under the authority of the Earth Supreme Council, health care and all the administrative functions that were entailed were to be universally mandated. This was not so much for the purpose of protecting individuals but for protecting society from individuals who pose a health risk.

In its most recent extension of global health care governance, the Supreme Council had authorized all listed insurance companies that provided health care coverage to require that their clients and new applicants receive industry-approved subcutaneous RFID tags for the purpose of identification and online medical records management. The roll-out was expected to take 2 years—5 in the countries of the Global South. Non-compliance at the individual level could lead to imprisonment and/or fines, while non-cooperation by communities could result in long-term periods of quarantine. To ensure as peaceful a transition as possible, the Earth Health Organization's security budget was quadrupled, and military and police units were seconded to the Earth Security Organization.

One incident which appeared in the Global Press—though how is beyond anyone's guess—illustrated why the Earth Supreme Council had emphasized the security dimensions of the project. A farmer in India—a radical land reformer and 'privacy fanatic' known to law enforcement—had refused the RFID injection and had started a riot in New Delhi in which 53 people were killed and 492 were detained. The instigator was disappeared. The Earth Council High Commissioner for South Asia had acted swiftly in dispatching security, and the rebellion was quashed in a matter of hours. In her press briefing after peace was restored to the streets, the High Commissioner took advantage of the situation by telling the hundreds of millions watching and listening that the riot had been precipitated by an irrational fear of science. Looking to her right, she spoke these words to her chief physician, "You have my permission," and forthwith the injection was completed. Having anticipated the skeptics, she then called for the wall projection to show the RFID tag as it looked under a powerful digital microscope. The identification number was redacted due to privacy concerns, but her point was made. Then, referring to the next image—a high-resolution magnification of a grain of sand from the beaches of Goa side by side with an RFID tag, hers—she observed, with her audience, that they were approximately the same size.

No other disruptions were reported by the Global Press—and this one report was subsequently purged from the Global Archives—and so the ambitious RFID'ing of the world's population of just over 6 billion proceeded on schedule, disproving the critics, the unassimilated capitalist class from the Global North who argue that centralization is inherently inefficient if not incentivized by the profit motive and the state aid of sovereign nations.