A new bill is moving through Congress that brings us closer to a national vaccine database telling the government whether you’re vaccinated. Action Alert!
HR 550, the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act of 2021, was approved by the House of Representatives late in November. While many of its provisions may sound innocuous, this bill creates a slippery slope to the government invading the medical privacy of citizens in the pursuit of higher vaccination rates, future vaccine mandates, and further limits on the freedom of the unvaccinated. This legislation must be opposed.
The bill would spend $400 million to modernize state “immunization information systems” which, we are told, are confidential, population-based databases that maintain a record of vaccine administrations. Crucially, the bill incentivizes states to standardize their immunization databases following CDC guidelines, which of course is the first step to combining them all into one national database. We’re told by the bill’s sponsors not to worry, that no national database is created by the bill, but the writing is clearly on the wall. Putting everything into the CDC’s language is an obvious prelude to further federal control and monitoring of this information.
The fact that President Biden’s current Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said that “it is absolutely the government’s business” to know people’s vaccination status does not inspire confidence that this bill will not be used to further the government’s vaccination program, Americans’ privacy be damned.
This bill would improve the ability of state and local governments to target the unvaccinated and strip citizens of their bodily autonomy. It could be used to identify the unvaccinated to restrict services, including healthcare, to these individuals. The bill’s sponsor says that bill will allow the government to send reminders to patients when they are due for a vaccine or a booster. There is a danger that this could be expanded to other health services: reminders to see the dentist, to get a regular physical, refill your prescription, etc. The opportunities for abuse are too many to list: what if health insurance rates go up for, or care is denied to, those who don’t follow the federal government’s “reminders”? Americans should never be required to allow the government access to private medical information. Fill out the form below to oppose this bill.
