Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

HIPPA is absolutely not too strict, it has many fundamental holes which need to be plugged.

I am vaccinated but the only place I am willing to prove it is at an airport or a medical facility. There is a developing liberty/security divide which is going very much in the direction of far too far. Going along with the irrational ways so many people talk about vaccination I am not willing to give up an inch of liberty to the hivemind. No “papers please” to allow me to participate in normal society where the group in power gets to decide if I’m acceptable.

View on HN

A club I attend is now proposing proof of vaccination for continued membership. I tried to inform them of a KISS one time paper proof of vaccination to registry that other businesses I visit practice instead of on prem or 3rd party service scanning of our vaccination cards which contains PII of Real Name, DOB and for some, Medical Record Number, MRN They were too spooked by the need for health safety ("We must have a safe place!") to grasp the implications of building a honeypot ready for exploit or sell off. So now they have name, address, DOB, MRN, CC, what else is missing? I think the other data brokers will fill the gaps. This a business relationship, not an employer. I fear more businesses will go unchallenged with this convenience route.

https://abc7news.com/vaccine-cards-security-covid-19-coronav...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/no-digital-vaccine-bou...

Now let's see where that MRN is embedded... http://dicom.nema.org/medical/Dicom/2016c/output/chtml/part0... http://www.j4jayant.com/2013/02/hl7-identifiers-person-patie...

What they have, more importantly, is a centralized record of your activities.

> HIPPA is absolutely not too strict, it has many fundamental holes which need to be plugged.

Citation needed? It’s HIPAA, by the way; one P and two As.

> There is a developing liberty/security divide which is going very much in the direction of far too far.

Total drivel. I’m sick of lockdowns and mask mandates. If you’re legally and medically eligible for a vaccine and you haven’t gotten one, I’m happy for private businesses to refuse you service.

>Citation needed?

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

There is an example. There has been a proliferation of for-profit companies offering health-related services which aren't counted as healthcare providers which a freely selling and distributing personal data for profit, to law enforcement, and accidentally because they are "not medicine" but in reality they are indeed collecting data about your health and giving you tools, information, and advice as a result of that data.

Companies covered by HIPAA are also sharing your health data extensively either through authorizations which don't very well describe the sharing which is actually happening, or freely without notification or approval as "deidentified" data which has been shown time and again to be rather trivial to unmask deidentified records to figure out the person in question.

You expressly allow that sharing of information when you use that service.

Also anonymizes healthcare data is neigh impossible to reconstruct so I don’t understand your claim.

Do you have any proof?

it has been repeatedly shown that deanonymized healthcare data is not hard to reconstruct. HIPAA defines a series of identifiers that have to be scrubbed, but it's not enough to prevent reidentification by a motivated adversary.

Did you attend a university in the US? If so, you almost certainly disclosed your vaccination status to them when you attended.

Also regular schools, in most cases (both public and private).

> No “papers please” to allow me to participate in normal society where the group in power gets to decide if I’m acceptable.

What are your thoughts on individuals contracting and spreading a disease that has killed millions already due to their refusal to comply with the most basic health and safety precautions?

Do you believe that someone's refusal to comply with basic sanitary precautions should take precedence over my and my family and loved one's desire to not die of a preventable disease?

And where do you draw the line in that refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions? Do you also extend it to other viral diseases that are preventable by vaccination such as measles, or do you single out covid?

Imagine being asked to show a driver's license before renting a car!

Imagine many of those being given to those who can't drive the car safely, because driving is considered a right in many communities.

Last I checked, I didn't need a license to go outside or buy a coffee.

That's the future I want to avoid, you want the screaming majority to dictate if you're allowed to do anything outside your home, go ahead and continue to advocate social control with this metaphor.

> Last I checked, I didn't need a license to go outside or buy a coffee

What I heard though is you may get carded to buy alcohol.

The drivers license proves that you won't be an unreasonable risk to other people commandeering a 4 ton death machine on the road.

No it doesn’t. [0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/

Standard expected response. Which is why I said unreasonable risk. Not zero risk. To test this hypothesis, take a car and drive it around for an hour. If someone doesn't ram into you, congratulations licensing works. Otoh drive around with a bunch of 13 year olds at the wheel. Experience is going to be very different.

One has to believe at some point that liberty is worth a certain amount of risk.

>Do you believe that someone's refusal to comply with basic sanitary precautions should take precedence over my and my family and loved one's desire to not die of a preventable disease?

Did you and your family get vaccinated? What unvaccinated people do does not affect your risk profile in any meaningful way. Are your kids too young to get vaccinated? The last flu season pre covid killed more under 18s than COVID-19 has.

Do we need government mandated vaccinations and mask mandates for every flu season now?

>And where do you draw the line in that refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions? Do you also extend it to other viral diseases that are preventable by vaccination such as measles, or do you single out covid?

Do you get asked if you've had a measles vaccine before you get seated at a restaurant? Are you suggesting this is a reasonable action?

You draw the line where there is a real serious threat which passes a certain threshold.

But with COVID-19 like so many things, the people speaking loudly about promoting their cause in protecting us from it (not the professionals) have absolutely no conditions for victory and will endlessly move goalposts forward and endlessly try to do more regardless if risks change by orders of magnitude.

If you're vaccinated or too young to be vaccinated, COVID-19 is over for you. The risk went from 1 in 1000 people dying to no worse than the risk in any flu season, unless that very mild risk makes you think that we should reinvent what personal freedoms in society means, stop turning and ending pandemic into a catastrophe.

>>> One has to believe at some point that liberty is worth a certain amount of risk.

Others will be taking a risk for your liberty, that is where it becomes unacceptable.

We live in a society and individual freedoms must be balanced by the responsibilities towards your fellow man.

This misses the point.

"Liberty" isn't the freedom to put yourself at risk with no consequences to anyone or anything else.

It is recognizing that there must be, at some point, a prioritization of giving people choices that might impact others.

>individual freedoms must be balanced by the responsibilities

Must be balanced not obliterated by "responsibilities".

>>> "Liberty" isn't the freedom to put yourself at risk with no consequences to anyone or anything else.

>>> It is recognizing that there must be, at some point, a prioritization of giving people choices that might impact others.

There will always be a set of people who prioritize themselves over others and in the case of corona as we have seen it just takes 1 selfish person to start the snowballing effectt.

We are seeing actual Zombie movie tropes playing out in real life coz of this corona pandemic. even if 98% of people get vaccinated, the holdout population maybe enough to incubate and spread new variants.

Do you really believe what you have written here? People who chose not to take a jab are zombies to you?

That's not what they wrote.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious here but arent those that don't want the vaccine a risk just for themselves? If they want to risk it it's their problem/choice.

One thing everyone seems to ignore is those people that have immunity/antibodies and don't actually need a vaccine. Why is that?

As far as I managed to read here and there not even the shot I had protects me from catching or spreading the virus. It only reduces(at least I hope) the damage done when infected even though my age group should be ok-ish even without.

Whichever vaccine you had, it has a high chance (90ish percent) of preventing any detectable infection, and as a corollary being contagious.

If you do lose the odds and develop an infection, the rates of various outcomes are all better. i.e. very low chance of death or ICU visit, very high chance of no or extremely mild symptoms

People don’t have a good understanding of statistics, of how to treat risk, or of basic disease dynamics.

Is this the same with antibodies from having had covid already?

There is less signal to noise when it comes to reinfections because the data is just harder to come by, but the preliminary evidence shows that reinfections do happen, but quite rarely (some numbers from a few waves of infections showed only 1 out of 150 positive results were from people who had tested positive previously). There has also been evidence that intensity of infection is correlated to post-infection immunity (i.e. if you were asymptomatic you have less immunity than if you were hospitalized)

It is reasonable to believe that having had an existing infection will boost your immunity against future infections and that both vaccines and previous infections will protect you on a diminishing basis, say, for a year or two. (based on existing covid evidence and the behavior of immunity to other coronaviruses which are common in humans which are usually very mild and referred to as a "cold")

If they don't vaccine and don't venture out it is fine. But if they don't take the vaccine and do go to work etc, the risk of them catching corona is higher. They in turn can spread to others.

We have seen the kind of snowballing effect 1 or 2 infected can cause.

Of course vaccines do not have 100% efficacy rate, but the risk of getting corona and its effects is at least a bit reduced if you get vaccinated.

>is at least a bit reduced

Reporting is that almost no intensive care patients in the US these days have been vaccinated.

We're not scared of covid-19 because it'll make us feel shitty for a few days, we're scared of it putting people on ventilators or killing them. There is a very strong signal that vaccination makes the rates of severe negative outcomes of infection very very small - down to the levels of many other rarely severe diseases which don't justify significant action.

> If you're vaccinated or too young to be vaccinated, COVID-19 is over for you. The risk went from 1 in 1000 people dying to no worse than the risk in any flu season, unless that very mild risk makes you think that we should reinvent what personal freedoms in society means, stop turning and ending pandemic into a catastrophe.

I'm not sure this is settled fact at the moment. There are known variants which have shown to reduce the efficacy of at least some of the available vaccines.

The danger isn't from the individual unvaccinated person, it's from pockets of them creating a reservoir of the virus from which new variants can develop. Strong arming people into being vaccinated is the stick with which to try to limit these reservoirs.

Personally, I'm comfortable with limiting peoples ability to attend mass events (which are elective and for entertainment value only) in the tail end of a pandemic without proof of vaccination, I'm less conformable about allowing employers (outside of perhaps those who work with people who are at risk) to do the same.

Something like five billion people have yet to have a single dose, I wouldn’t be too worried about “pockets” of holdouts yet.

Yes, variants have shown to be less inhibited by vaccines… but that’s just it, less. Ever had a cold? Influenza? Variants make some vaccinated people sick, but almost none of them end up in the ICU, they’re full of unvaccinated people.

> Strong arming people into being vaccinated is the stick with which to try to limit these reservoirs.

I suppose then that after every single person in more developed countries is vaccinated, we should start readying the troops for invasion into the less developed countries that, inevitably, will not be fully vaccinated? Otherwise, pockets > variants > travel > reinfection.

Or is too inhumane to invade a country to force them to vaccinate fully? Maybe we should just isolate them economically and close borders with them until they do it themselves.

How far should we go?

I understood your personal thresholds, and thank you for sharing. For me only the government should make and enforce a decision on public health at scale, not any employer, that's my threshold.

I have seen other thresholds being crossed in the last 2 years, but now mine has been crossed, and I don't see this slowing down. What's the next threshold to be crossed?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com