Vaccine Passports and HIPAA Laws! HIPAA is Already Relaxed. And You Thought They Couldn't Ask About Vaccines?

There's a lot to cover here, and I want to get it in with as few words as possible.

Most of the people who are speaking out about vaccine passports are doing so on the basis that your health information is private. They quote the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA. Your health information is NOT private. In fact it can be released for the following reasons:

As you can see the list is extensive. HIPAA was really designed to keep individuals from getting ahold of your medical records. What most people don't know is that HIPAA greatly increased access to your medical records for a number of reasons and for a number of institutions. Like anything else in the political world, those institutions and their designations can change over time. HIPAA was like any other law passed in Congress, it's intended purpose was the opposite of what its name suggests.

How many reasons can the government, or an agency (add company) get ahold of your medical history? Before relaxing the rules? See above, think of how many of those reasons could be used in a "pandemic." Now you understand why HIPAA will work against you when it comes to vaccine passports, not for you.

This brings me to my next point. HIPAA laws have recently been relaxed, giving the government and its designated authorities greater access to medical records in general.

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the need for an informed and coordinated public health response, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar has declared a limited waiver of the following provisions of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Beginning March 15, 2020, these provisions have been waived:

• Requirements to obtain a patient's agreement to speak with family members or friends involved in the patient’s care
• Requirement to honor a request to opt out of the facility directory
• Requirement to distribute a notice of privacy practices
• Patient's right to request privacy restrictions
• Patient's right to request confidential communications

This limited waiver is designed to facilitate the disclosure of patients’ protected health information in a number of specific circumstances connected to the ongoing pandemic

This waiver issued by Secretary Azar only applies under limited circumstances and is applicable:

• In the emergency area identified in the public health emergency declaration
• To hospitals that have instituted a disaster protocol
• For up to 72 hours from the time the hospital implements its disaster protocol. If the public health emergency declaration is terminated by the President or the Secretary before the end of this 72-hour period, then the hospital must return to compliance with the provisions of the Privacy Rule.

The whole country is the "emergency area identified in the public health emergency declaration!"

Coronavirus Disease 2019

When a national emergency was declared on March 13, 2020, we took action nationwide to aggressively respond to COVID-19.

You can read the blanket waivers for COVID-19 in the List of Blanket Waivers (PDF) UPDATED (4/9/2021).

The Public Health Service Act was used to declare a public health emergency (PHE) in the entire United States on January 31, 2020 giving us the flexibility to support our beneficiaries, effective January 27, 2020. The PHE was renewed on April 21, 2020, July 23, 2020, October 2, 2020, January 7, 2021, and April 15, 2021, effective April 21, 2021.

If you thought HIPAA was going to stop them from issuing vaccine passports, you were dead wrong.

How do we stop this from happening? I'm not sure. What I do know is that they desperately wish to implement a Corporate Social Credit System like in China.

The term “Corporate Social Credit System” is a somewhat of a misnomer, and the use of the word “system” is misleading, as it implies that the CSCS is a single, holistic, techno-regulatory apparatus, and that each policy under the social credit banner is a node in an integrated regulatory framework. In fact, while the data aggregation is centralized, the policy environment surrounding the CSCS is a disjointed mix of national and sector-specific policies, municipal pilot projects, and hybrid public-private sector cooperative agreements, loosely centered around the goal of enhancing market “trustworthiness.”

The CSCS has been chronically misunderstood outside of China. The system’s broad scope and technical and legal complexity, coupled with a lack of English-language primary source documentation on social credit, present significant barriers to understanding the realities of the system’s aims and functions. Without clear insight into the CSCS’s design, technologies, functions, policies, goals, and limits, U.S. policymakers and businesses are at a disadvantage in assessing how the CSCS may or may not evolve to negatively impact U.S. companies operating in China, or be leveraged by Chinese regulators to disadvantage or otherwise impact U.S. businesses. In this report, we draw on several thousand Chinese primary sources to describe what the system is and what it does.

So similar to our credit bureaus here, only in China they are determining your credit based on how you act, not your ability to repay debt. Apparently steering people with economic incentives just doesn't work well enough for the Chinese.

Multiple government bodies and state regulators control various blacklists relevant to their jurisdictional mandate and have administrative authority to determine which companies are added to such lists. Companies and individuals cannot be blacklisted on a completely arbitrary basis, as there are pre-determined types of violation that lead to blacklisting, but officials still hold discretionary power in terms of which violations are pursued and how severely violations are treated. China is currently working to further standardize the procedures for the creation of new blacklists, notifications, objections, blacklist removal and credit repair.

So yes, they can do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do about it.

This is a dark path to a dystopian future. If we start down this road, as the Chinese already have, we most likely will never come back.

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