Anyone else with privacy concerns about providing proof of vaccination?
Let me get a few things out of the way:
- I believe in the medicine (good grief that sounds like a religious confession).
- I was and continue to be eager to get whatever protection is available as soon as possible.
- I'm perfectly fine with masks, and prefer them anyway.
But I'm very concerned about participating in the data collection and usage involved with vaccine enforcement. Microsoft, for example, requires its US employees to upload evidence of vaccination before entering facilities. They have not (yet) required full time employees to return to office, but once they do, the subtle implication may well be that if one doesn't provide evidence of one's vaccination status, that the employee may well be fired.
I'm already extremely wary of how technology can be used unethically to stigmatize minority groups that fall out of favor with people of privilege. We are effectively building and tolerating the use of data for precisely this purpose. This kind of data collection seems ripe for centralization. I'm sure just taking the vaccine is logged by the CDC or in some other database--that continues to be an ongoing risk. But now my employer stands to more directly and more swiftly impact people negatively through the collection of, and decision-making on my personal medical data. This will be a case where data collected from individuals will be used to disenfranchise people who may well have taken the vaccine, but cannot ethically participate in a system that goes contrary to its mission... which in Microsoft's case, is to "empower every person on the planet to achieve more."
I don't find many voices articulating how I stand with both vaccines and data collection--I wonder if anyone else in the tech industry shares my concerns...
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OP, your argument reminds me of the security argument of “if you have nothing to hide, why are you against surveillance?” One can be against surveillance, one can use encrypted messaging, even when one is only texting shopping lists. Similarly, one can be unwilling to share vaccination status, even if one is vaccinated, to protect the unvaccinated from their status being revealed.
It's your choice (99% of the time unless for health reasons) to NOT get vaccinated, so now even if by choice you decide to not trust science, why would people go out of their way to "protect" your decision of not getting the vaccine?
If you decide to not get vaccinated, you have to deal with the consequences. That's the beauty of choice.
Now, if employers allow work to be fully remote, you can do whatever you want. But if you are going to return to the office.... I don't think so
I don't believe in the religious exemption. In my experience that's just a bs excuse related to fetal cells, because those people are willing to use all the other modern medicines that were tested with fetal cells, including many many common over the counter meds. One more thing to irritate the anti-vaxers, it's also pretty obvious that there are hundreds of thousands of dead people who didn't vaccinate and got covid, are there even 10 people that died from the vaccine? It's not a conspiracy to hide it, fox news would be covering anyone who this unfortunately happened too. I know it's not impossible to get severely ill from the vaccine - a friend of mine did, and now he has to take the non-mRNA vaccines apparently, and switch from pfizer.
What is so special about HPV vaccine. That also fall under the same category where its recommended for everyone.