COVID Vaccination

Full Title or Meme

This is an examination of the actual experience of COVID Vaccination and how well-meaning effort collide to create mass confusion.

Context

The COVID Vaccination experience as the US comes out of the first phase of the pandemic and begins to deal with vaccination.

Current Use Cases

I got a shot today and talked to a friend who got a shot at the VA. Here is the way I see it today. At the end I will explain why this is broken. I called (more that once) to sked a shot. I finally got on the calendar. At that point a record was made of my name and birth date. I went it to get the shot, my data was validated, the pharmacy checked my insurance card to ensure they would be paid and i was given a shot. My record was updated at that time and a label was printed out that was (in effect) a shot cred. They peeled off the print out on sticky tag an applied that to a CDC Covid-19 Card form MLS 319813_r This is the credential I could put in my wallet, but it is not the medical record. The medical record should be in the lab, the paper card is the credential. I went home i tried to avail myself of the 21st Century Cures act to download my health data. It turns out that since a pharmacy giving me my shot, the standard pharmacy proof-of-presence was a prescription number. Since i had never been to that particular pharmacy before, i could not authenticate myself and so could not get a digital record of my shot.

So what is the problem? The medical record existed, but no method to authenticate me to the record was available. The paper form will (with any luck) be sent to the CDC which might at some future data, actually record the event but under some privacy-enforcing de-identification code. One needs to wonder if privacy and public health will ever be able to talk to each other.