Biosecurity grooming
There's no stopping progress. Not even in Russia
At the end of March, Russia’s Federal COVID Nanny, Anna Popova, was forced to capitulate on many of her ingenious health-preserving rituals for schools, including “minimizing physical contact between different classes” and arranging desks to create “zigzag seating for exams.”
It was a risky gambit—would Russia’s healthcare system be able to cope if children stopped sitting in zigzag formations?—but sometimes you just have to YOLO.
However, in some regions, one vital aspect of Popova’s Biosecurity Regime remained: temperature checks.
On March 25, Moscow’s Department of Education announced that while most virus rules would be lifted, youngsters would continue to have their temperature taken at school entrances to “prevent the spread of coronavirus.”
St. Petersburg authorities made a similar decision four days later. Most restrictions would be lifted, but temperature checks at schools would remain.
This is biosecurity grooming, plain and simple. Schoolchildren across Russia are being conditioned to view themselves as potential biohazards requiring constant monitoring and surveillance. They’re being trained to believe they are suspects in an epidemiological pre-crime.
It starts with “harmless” temperature checks but it leads to a Gattaca-inspired biometric control grid. We know this because it’s already happening (albeit in pilot form) in Russia.
In Kirov (located about 900km northeast of Moscow), construction crews are putting the final touches on a new “smart” school that will feature a “body temperature monitoring” device at the entrance. The school will begin accepting students on September 1, 2022, the start of the next academic year.
In the city of Cheboksary, a local school “installed hardware and software systems for hand disinfection with the function of measuring body temperature and face recognition.”
According to the school’s website, this new biosecurity system is perfect for preventing all kinds of health threats—past, present, and future. COVID may one day leave us, but the Face-Activated Hand Sanitizing System is here forever:
In Samara, authorities unveiled a new school where “the safety and comfort of children come first.” The educational institution, which opened its doors in autumn 2021, features an impressive array of high-tech health-protecting gadgetry:
How it will work in the school year: the child puts a magnetic key on the door to enter the school grounds, then in the hall he goes to the turnstile, which identifies the student. The same Face ID system measures the temperature of each visitor and only allows them to go to school when normal. If the temperature of the child is elevated, the parents will be called and asked to take them home. Now a mechanism is being worked out, with the help of which parents will be able to monitor the child during the day, to observe his movements.
Is this a school or a medium-security bio-prison?
In Vologda, northwest Russia, an enterprising school installed a thermal-imaging camera in February 2020—way ahead of the curve:
The pilot program was apparently a huge success, prompting several other schools in the city to adopt similar surveillance systems.
A secondary school in Moscow took a similar route to ensure public health by purchasing a state-of-the-art “thermographic complex.”
The facial recognition system can monitor multiple people at the same time, allowing administrators to “promptly find a [suspected biohazard] in a crowd of students in order to send him for an additional examination or contact his parents to pick him up.”
In Yamal, northwest Siberia, they have glowing reviews about a “non-contact” biosecurity checkpoint installed in a school in September 2020:
The best part about this system is that it’s “easy to expand”:
“The access control terminal with face recognition and non-contact body temperature measurement is a necessary technological solution that will allow students and teachers to feel safe… It is important to note that in the future, the terminal for non-contact temperature measurement can be used during periods of other seasonal diseases. Also, the functionality of the system is easy to expand. For example, to add a video analytics module and integrate it into the existing access control system of an educational institution,” said Alexander Oboltin, director of the Yamalo-Nenets branch of PJSC Rostelecom … When the system identifies a person with a temperature above a given norm, an audible alert is triggered.
The terminal measures body temperature with high accuracy. In addition, with additionally set parameters, the digital device can monitor compliance with the mask regime at the school. For those who have not put on a protective medical bandage, the device will give recommendations via voice message on compliance with mandatory sanitary safety standards. If they are not fulfilled, the turnstile at the entrance to the educational institution will not open.
This is just a small sample of the most heartwarming examples of biosecurity grooming currently underway in Russia.
Is there any evidence that these types of biosecurity systems are being abandoned or derailed in any way? No. None that we have seen.
You can’t stop progress, not even in super-sanctioned, “anti-Davos” Russia.
How did this happen?
Hide your kids.
Quite clever introducing it in school. Get the kids to conform while young so they’re less likely to resist as adults. And I bet all the technology looks fancy to them so it’s an exciting prospect, a desired glitzy leash.
🎯... nowhere to hide.