“The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again,” Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker report.
“The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” they add. “Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.”
The news prompted a swift reaction from Chris Bish, a Republican who was soundly defeated last year in a bid to take the seat held by Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.). Bish tweeted this:
But the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act doesn’t apply to medical information itself.
Rather, it applies to doctors, hospitals and health insurers — basically, “covered entities” who aren’t permitted to share personal medical information with third parties. That means these medical providers and insurers can’t just share information about who has been vaccinated unless they have a legal exemption to do so.
The Biden administration is envisioning a very different scenario, in which individuals are given a record of their own immunization – either digitally or on paper – and then can be asked to share it for entrance to certain places. Under that scenario, HIPAA wouldn’t be relevant because it has to do with people sharing their own medical information.
“I go to get my shot, somebody working there hands me a piece of paper with a stamp on it,” said Kirk Nahra, a data privacy lawyer with WilmerHale. “What I then do with that has nothing to do with HIPAA.”
This doesn’t negate legitimate concerns around vaccine passports.
Republicans and conservatives reacted swiftly, calling the effort tyrannical and urging politicians to fight back against any moves in the public or private sector to require people to shove proof of immunization.
Political strategist Bryan Dean Wright:
A Republican running against Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.):
Ben Domenech, co-founder of the Federalist:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said he’ll issue an executive order forbidding vaccine passports and called on the GOP-led legislature to consider a measure addressing such passports.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the best approach to vaccine passports would be a “decentralized” system. Such a system should give individuals control over when they choose to show their proof of vaccination that doesn’t allow a centralized issuer to track the information, he said.
The possibility that a third party could access the information is what raises privacy concerns, said Rebecca Coyle, executive director of the American Immunization Registry Association.
“Ideally I think the goal would be an individual can take their digital card and be responsible for who they share that information with,” Coyle said. “I get nervous when I think about immunization data flowing to any third party entities outside the medical space.”
It’s not at all clear there will even be vaccine passports.
There are already at least 17 passport initiatives underway, my colleagues reported. To make passports widely usable, officials would need to create standards for the type of information they must maintain, convince issuers and holders to use the same app or set of apps and figure out how to provide a paper-based system for those who don’t have cellphones. Those are a lot of logistical challenges that would need to be undertaken in a short period of time.
“This is a herculean task,” Stanley said. “Call me a little skeptical that this is something that can be done in the next six months.”
The White House insists vaccine passports will be led by the private sector.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said federal agencies are working on guidelines around the handling of passports. She’d been asked about comments by Andy Slavitt, White House senior adviser on the coronavirus response, who said the federal government is “not viewing its role as the place to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens.”
“We expect, as Andy Slavitt I think alluded to, that a determination or development of a vaccine passport or whatever you want to call it will be driven by the private sector,” Psaki said. “Ours will more be focused on guidelines that can be used as a basis.”
She added that there will be “no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”
But federal officials will seek to ensure any vaccination credential system meets “high standards, whether that’s universal accessibility, affordability, availability,” she added.
Ahh, oof and ouch
AHH: Pfizer and Moderna doses are 90 percent effective in real-life conditions.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of 4,000 health-care personnel, police, firefighters and other essential workers, is the first to estimate the effectiveness against infection — rather than just monitoring for symptomatic cases — including infections that do not result in any symptoms.
“The CDC report is significant, experts said, because it analyzed how well the vaccines worked among a diverse group of front-line working-age adults whose jobs make them more likely to be exposed to the virus and to spread it,” The Post’s Lena H. Sun reports.
The study found that the vaccines reduce the risk of infection by 80 percent after the first shot and protection increased to 90 percent following the second dose. Among 2,479 fully vaccinated people, just three had confirmed infections. Among 477 people who received one dose, eight infections were reported.
OOF: Biden called on states to reinstate mask mandates and suspend reopening plans.
“Please, this is not politics,” Biden said. “Reinstate the mandate if you let it down, and businesses should require masks as well. A failure to take this virus seriously — precisely what got us into this mess in the first place — risks more cases and more deaths.”
Hospitals have reported seeing a younger population of patients, although they differ on whether the new variants appear to be driving the trend. The reopening of businesses and other activities may contribute to outbreaks of the virus, and, while more than 70 percent of elderly people have received at least one vaccine dose, many middle-aged and younger people are unprotected.
Walensky went off script in a briefing on Monday, saying that she had a feeling of impending doom. “We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope. But right now, I’m scared,” she said.
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health:
OUCH: New York health officials were told to prioritize coronavirus tests for people close to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
Seven individuals, who spoke with The Post on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by Cuomo’s office, described the behind-the-scenes operations that allowed New York’s powerful to bypass the overburdened systems available to the general public.
At least five people described tests sites where officials were told to give special treatment to people described as “priorities,” “specials,” “inner circle” or “criticals.” Two individuals said that a top state physician involved in coordinating testing at nursing homes was dispatched multiple times to the Hamptons home of CNN host Chris Cuomo, the governor’s brother.
State officials have vehemently denied that people were given special treatment because of connections Cuomo.
More in coronavirus news
A World Health Organization report doesn’t resolve questions over where the coronavirus originated.
The report says that the coronavirus most likely jumped from animals, such as a bat or a pangolin, to an intermediate animal before infecting humans – and plays down the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab. The team recommends further study of the possibility that transmission occurred via frozen food, a once-fringe theory favored by Chinese government scientists, but does not recommend additional research on the lab-leak hypothesis, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post.
The report, to be released today, offers the most detailed look yet at what happened in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and early 2020.
“However, the findings are far from conclusive and will be overshadowed by questions about China’s lack of transparency — and the WHO’s apparent inability to press for more,” The Post’s Emily Rauhala reports.
Yesterday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus seemed to contradict the report’s findings, saying that all hypotheses remain open and warrant further study.
“Given China’s coverup of the outbreak in Wuhan, the WHO’s early praise for the country’s response and the fact that it took a full year to get a joint Chinese-international team on the ground for a brief visit, the critical but challenging search for clues faced skepticism from the start,” Emily writes.
More Americans are making up their minds to get a vaccine.
In December 2020, 39 percent of Americans wanted to wait and see before getting a vaccine. Three months later, that number is down to 17 percent of Americans, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Meanwhile, more than 6 in 10 Americans say that they have either received at least one dose of a vaccine or want to as soon as possible, up from just over a third in December.
The shift in enthusiasm is greatest among Black adults, with 55 percent now saying that they have gotten a vaccine dose or want to as soon as possible, up 14 percentage points from a KFF poll in February. Sixty-one percent of Hispanic adults and 64 percent of White adults respond similarly.
A minority of Americans remain committed to not getting a vaccine, with 20 percent saying that they will definitely not get a vaccine or only will if required for work, school or other activities.
A New York judge ruled the state must vaccinate prisoners.
“The order, the first involving any of the country’s largest correctional systems, comes as the coronavirus continues to roar through facilities in New York. At least 1,100 people living behind prison walls have tested positive for the virus since the start of last month, and five have died,” the New York Times’s Troy Closson reports. “But even as corrections staff and many other groups, including some who live in close-contact settings like group homes and homeless shelters, have gained access to the vaccines in recent weeks, most incarcerated people in New York have remained ineligible to receive doses.”
Justice Alison Y. Tuitt of the Bronx County Supreme Court wrote that state officials had “irrationally distinguished between incarcerated people and people living in every other type of adult congregate facility, at great risk to incarcerated people’s lives during this pandemic.”
States have varied on their timelines for providing doses to those behind bars. New Jersey began inoculating incarcerated people late last year, but other states, like Florida, have not yet made people in state prisons eligible. Colorado backtracked on a plan to give prisoners priority access amid backlash on social media and from Republican politicians.
Trump administration officials are admitting to major failures in the U.S. coronavirus response.
Top doctors admitted missteps during a CNN special that aired Sunday night.
- Brett Giroir, who served as the nation’s coronavirus testing czar, said that the administration’s repeated claims that there were millions of tests available at the beginning of the pandemic were false.
- Deborah Birx, who served as White House coronavirus coordinator, said that hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been prevented by a more effective response, and also criticized the White House rollout of tests. “People really believed in the White House that testing was driving cases, rather than testing was a way for us to stop cases,” she said.
“But the finger-pointing and portrayals of some episodes prompted critics to say that former Trump administration officials who managed the pandemic response have turned to a new project: managing their legacies,” The Post’s Dan Diamond writes. “The CNN special is among the first of a slew of in-progress books and other projects plumbing the Trump administration’s oft-chaotic response to the coronavirus, providing former officials an opportunity to air their side of the story — often in a far more favorable light than previously reported.”
Jerome M. Adams, who served as surgeon general under President Donald Trump:
Elsewhere in healthcare
The Supreme Court will determine if Kentucky’s attorney general can intervene to defend an abortion restriction.
The case revolves around a challenge to a Kentucky law that would effectively ban after 15 weeks a common abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation. But the court will not consider whether the law itself is constitutional. Instead, the question is whether Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, can defend the law, against the wishes of the state’s Democratic governor, The Post’s Robert Barnes reports.
