Vaccine passport

Here is an article about vaccine passports.

At the moment, vaccine passports aren't really defined but there are 17 ish proposals in the government canal....pipeline...um. I think the push is to have a way of telling who is vaccinated. The effort seems to be backed up right now.

The comment that it does not violate hipaa is correct. I have been giving patients their clinic note as they leave on new patient visits for the last ten years. They can publish it on their blog and it would not be a hipaa violation, because they are publishing their own medical information. They can tell anyone they want, whatever medical information they choose. "My corns hurt." is not a hipaa violation.

My initial thought is that paper will be forged. The government can use passport and money making technology to make it less forgable.

Or we could have the chip implants, heh.

Or tattoos on the forearm, but those are too easy to forge. Maybe special invisible tattoo ink? I'd better patent that idea right away.

What other ways? A phone scan thing is mentioned in the article.

A conservative friend just told me NO WAY will he get a vaccine passport. He says it's an issue of privacy. I say it's public health. I can cite examples: a huge outbreak of measles in the midwest a while ago. An unimmunized group went to India and got measles. The CDC said please do not come back in the US for 21 days, because after 21 days it is not infectious. One person chose to ignore the CDC request and measles broke out in the midwest. It cost us taxpayers millions to track down, quarantine and clean up.

My friend says that person should have to pay. Yeah, well, might take a while to garnish that back.

Another example is the guy with KNOWN infectious drug resistent tuberculosis who chose to go on an airplane full of people. That person should have to pay every penny of the whole tracking all the people on that airplane to see if they get it. Don't know how that one turned out. I was livid at him.

My friend says it's politicized.

I say I ignore politics when I doctoring, because I want to help the person, even if they a three toed discriminating sloth from the deep jungle. I don't care what their politics is.

He says I am not getting a vaccine passport because it's politicizing it.

I say YOU is guilty TOO because YOU are politicizing it.

He laughs and says his rope broke..... gotta go fix it.

I text: At the end of your rope, dear?

A vaccine passport is a currently hypothetical document that shows that a person has received a vaccine -- at this time, a Covid-19 vaccine -- that grants them rights to travel or participate in commercial activities within their community, city, state, or country.

This is akin to a number of existing systems which require vaccines for traveling between countries; while the best known international standard is the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis, commonly called a Yellow Card, most doctors can hand you a piece of paper that will be accepted by the appropriate authorities to allow you to Officially Document that you can enter a given region. Because the framework for requiring and documenting vaccination exists, is well established, has been in use for decades, and requires willful ignorance on an absolutely inane scale to ignore, anyone talking about a 'vaccine passport' is not talking about anything like an actual passport.

What they are talking about is pretty much up in the air. As of this posting, some government officials are talking about various vaccination requirements for doing various things; any sort of documentation of the vaccination involved in one of these things will be dubbed a vaccine passport. This results in a meaningless term for people to have Strong Opinions about.

Currently, it looks like vaccine passports will usually be free mobile apps that people can download to certify that they have received a vaccine. If they feel that it benefits them to demonstrate this, they can. If you have not been vaccinated, or do not have a mobile device, this might limit you from doing certain things -- entering certain businesses, traveling on certain transports, attending a friend's birthday party... the possibilities are endless.

While this could be a bad thing, it is somewhat telling that the same people who argue for strong voter ID laws and border control are arguing against vaccine passports, and vice versa; and also everyone is carrying trackable and hackable computers hooked up to a public network in their back pocket all day, every day. This is not so much a privacy issue or a individual rights issue as it is a way for people to signal their ingroup, and as such we, as a species, are doomed. Not because of this, but because everything is like this.