vaccinations/health care and product promotions.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

This is what the US vaccine card looks like:



The only things on the card that a normal US employer wouldn't already have are the patient number, and the type/lot number/date/site of vaccination.

The patient number is intended to be used for the number the vaccination site uses to identify the person, not their social security number (which the employer has, of course) or medicare ID number. Medical record number is a standard term for that: It'd be the number that (say) a hospital system uses to keep track of my medical records in their affiliated facilities. The IIS number is related to consolidating vaccination information in an electronic record, so all info is available to doctors/clinics/etc. about all the vaccinations a person has had.

As a generality, the records associated with those numbers (at the health care provide/data aggregator facility) are protected health information (PHI) under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). That does *not* mean the number itself, or other data on the card, when you give it to your employer, is HIPAA protected (because one's employer is not typically a HIPAA covered entity). Other privacy protection regulations will likely apply, though - some complicated set of both federal and state regulations.

On my card, the patient number is left blank.

I think that using the term "data mining" in this context may be misleading, and it's a term that's often used imprecisely.

I'm not saying, in any of the above, that one should not be concerned about invasions of privacy, by one's employer or others; or should not be concerned about data aggregation (i.e., with whom your employer might share that data, and how it might be used by the employer or others). There are certainly legit concerns people could have.

"Data mining" is maybe a more scary-sounding term, but technically it means something more like statistical pattern recognition in large collections of diverse data. If your employer aggregated the vaccination information for employees, augmented it with other information they hold about those employees, maybe even sought out outside information about the same people and included it in some data analysis to figure out patterns in who was or wasn't getting vaccinated (statistical trends), or something like that, that last analysis bit would maybe be data mining, in the technical sense. Most employers aren't going to spend money on doing something like that, realistically.

If you look up "data mining" on the web, look at sources with actual reason to know what the term means (vs. those with theories about questionable corporate behavior but no technical knowledge), like IBM, statistical software providers, etc.

There can be reasons to be concerned about data mining, too, but I don't think that giving one's employer one's vax card is really the same thing.

Granted that data mining is the wrong term, in my experience personal information and medical information privacy rights are mostly honored only in the breach. I don't think once in my entire life has a medical care provider given me a copy of their privacy policy and my HIPAA rights without my asking, even though every one of them pretends to comply with the law by asking you to sign something saying you have been given a copy of that information. When I have pointed out politely that they have not in fact given me that information before asking me to sign, they're seldom remotely gracious about it. The attitude generally seems to be that I'm a trouble maker for asking and I should just shut up and sign the *kitten* thing.

And now my employer is asking for medical information that they won't be legally responsible for keeping private (because they're not obtaining it in the context of providing me with medical care), even though there is no practical reason for them to have it, since they do not maintain a physical facility that I have access to. I have no physical contact with any of my fellow employees. I don't share the same space with them.

I'm vaccinated. I think everybody who can be safely vaccinated should be. I have no objection to showing my vaccine card to anyone who wants to see it before I enter a building. Heck, if my employer made the case that they wanted to ascertain my vaccination status for purposes of differentiating insurance premiums based on risk, I wouldn't object (although it would seem a bit hypocritical, as they allow non-smokers to merely "attest" to their nonsmoker status for insurance purposes). If they were saying they wanted everyone vaccinated because they didn't want to deal with long illnesses and having to replace people who die, I'd shrug and upload an image of my vaccination card.

But they're not making those arguments. They say they want the image because they're not going to let unvaccinated people into the offices that they still maintain for some other employees -- offices I don't go to and was not welcome at even in pre-covid days (they basically reneged on the promise that we could call and reserve space if we needed to leave our homes and go to business meetings in the city; instead, if I need to go to a meeting, I have to "rent" space in a coffee shop by buying coffee whether I want it or not while I'm waiting for the meeting time or finishing out the day rather than lose time in transit during work hours).

And I'm sure that the people who are still provided with offices, lighting, electricity to power computers, HVAC, free coffee, etc., etc., are using company-provided scanners and faxers and whatever other equipment they might need to upload their documents, along with whatever tech support they might need if they're not familiar with the equipment or the process. Those of use who aren't worth office space will be on our own in terms of figuring that all out, including probably having to go to a business supply store and risk having our medical information saved digitally by their scanners and faxers.

And frankly, there are days when I'm tired of listening to people talking during company online meetings and in online chat spaces about how hard it has been working from home for most of the past year and a half, because it was hard for me before, and it won't stop being hard when covid stops having such an impact on our lives, and my company never acknowledges in any of its policies or statements that they made it hard for a subset of their employees before the pandemic, and won't be doing anything to make it less hard for us after the pandemic.

Also can someone tell me the avg age of the covid deaths?? Last time I saw a statistic i believe it was very late 70s. Very close to if not higher than life expectancy age. Not to make light of those deaths but just to add context to the conversation. Social media and media in general would have you believe that if you get covid that you may or may not live even if 15 years old and healthy. Too many people have been terrified by covid because the media will not frame this disease with hard data and sadly most people will not dig to find it.

MargaretYakoda wrote: »

JoPat409 wrote: »

3) What are you on about? The media has been reporting hard data since the beginning.

If they were focused on hard data, the present conflict would be about obesity levels rather than getting every single person vaccinated.

JoPat409 wrote: »

Also can someone tell me the avg age of the covid deaths?? Last time I saw a statistic i believe it was very late 70s.

Anecdata, but: My sister is a doctor in ICU. She got vaccinated early on but was somewhat sceptical (to me, not to patients) in the middle. She had been horrified for weeks now with how younger and younher people have been dying in their ICU and all the young ones who die - virtually all of the young one who get there - are unvaxed.

Again - just anecdata, for those on the fence who think they are young and invulnerable.

Another (slightly related) point. When Canada mandated the vaccine for indoor dining etc., the vax rate in the 20-something crowd went up... and overall cases went significantly down. Another hint that people who are not getting vaccinated because "they personally don't need it" are the ones fuelling the spread at this stage.