In an April 19 article at LewRockwell.com, natural-health entrepreneur Dr. Joseph Mercola updates readers on his ongoing investigation into government tracking of the unvaccinated.
Last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) added three new diagnostic codes to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), a medical list maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO). The new codes specifically target immunization status. If you have not received the Covid jab, your medical chart will now bear the stamp Z28.310 (unvaccinated for COVID-19). If you are not fully boosted, you’ll be labeled with Z28.311 (partially vaccinated for COVID-19). Patients deemed vaccine deficient in non-Covid related diseases get the designation Z28.39 (other under-immunization status).
Fact-checkers such as Reuters spout the usual “nothing to see here” response. The diagnosis codes merely help doctors identify at-risk patients and help public health officials track statistics, they say. However, WHO specifies that ICDs “support payment systems [and] service planning,” among other patient-care roles.
In fact, since 2021 healthcare providers have been using Covid vaccination status to determine whether to service individual patients. In October 2021, the Cleveland Clinic canceled a life-saving kidney transplant surgery since the donor was not vaccinated. Colorado’s UCHealth confirmed its 2021 policy to deny organ transplants to unvaccinated patients.
Last year a three-year-old toddler from Cyprus with serious heart disease could not get lifesaving surgery because his parents were not vaccinated against Covid; three countries rejected him on that basis. April 2022 saw an Ohio hospital refuse to perform a kidney transplant on nine-year-old Tanner Donaldson because his father/potential donor refused the Covid jab. And this past April, Emory Healthcare, Inc. of Atlanta rejected a 41-year-old homeschooling mother of seven for a kidney transplant. Though she already had Covid and recovered, she could not receive this life-saving care because she refused the jab.
These are just a few examples of the common practice afflicting patients worldwide.
Privacy Protected, Except When It’s Not
Mercola argues that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), supposedly designed to protect patient privacy, gives ample exemptions to government agencies to pry into individuals’ medical records.
In fact, federal agencies such as the CDC are “particularly justified to access your private vaccination data if there’s an outbreak of infectious disease, be it real or fictitious,” writes Mercola. He quotes CDC’s guidance document regarding HIPAA’s Privacy Rule, which “expressly permits disclosures without individual authorization to public health authorities … including but not limited to public health surveillance, investigation, and intervention.…” (Emphasis added.)
Moreover, CDC’s Public Health Law permits personal patient data to be disclosed to third parties “without patient authorization,” and the reasons fall under the all-encompassing umbrella rationale: “for public health purposes.”
But there is further reason to assume that the new codes will be used for the explicit purpose of tracking the unvaccinated: the committee in charge of ICD codes said they will. “The new subcodes that track COVID jab status were added in mid-September 2021 during an ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee meeting, and during that meeting, they specified that ‘there is interest in being able to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized,'” writes Mercola. The excuse for this tracking of individuals was “public health.”
To add insult to injury, the subcodes even indicate the reasons individuals are not Covid-jabbed. Here is a sample list, courtesy of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP):
For immunization refusal due to religious belief or group pressure, ICD-10 code Z28.1, ‘Immunization not carried out because of patient decision for reasons of belief or group pressure.’
For immunization refusal due to another reason, such as the discomfort of injections, ICD-10 code Z28.21, ‘Immunization not carried out because of patient refusal.’
For immunization refusal by a parent or other caregiver for a child, ICD-10 code Z28.82, ‘Immunization not carried out because of caregiver refusal.’
AAFP specifies that these codes are necessary “for quality initiatives and continuity of care.” Does that mean care will not be continued in certain cases? Mercola puts specific emphasis on the fact that the general code Z28.39 (other under-immunization status) lays “the foundation for … medical persecution.”
Smokescreen
Mercola also notes that the “codes could be put to good use” should health officials employ them to track vaccine efficacy. However, the fact that federal bureaucrats already ignore pharmacovigilance data reflected in CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicates yet again that the codes exist for other purposes.
So why not simply ask CDC about its intent? Nine Republicans from the U.S. House of Representatives did so in February, but have yet to hear back. The Daily Signal reported that the lawmakers asked five questions:
Why did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) decide to start gathering data on why Americans chose not to take the COVID-19 vaccine?
How do CDC and NCHS intend to use these new COVID-19 vaccination ICD codes?
What steps are the CDC and NCHS taking to ensure that Americans’ private health information contained in the ICD system is protected?
Will the CDC and NCHS confirm that they have not, will not, and cannot create a database of Americans based on their COVID-19 vaccination status?
Can the CDC and NCHS confirm that private companies do not have access to lists of Americans’ COVID-19 vaccination status through the ICD system, or any other database overseen by the CDC and NCHS?
The fact that CDC refuses to answer these questions is a huge red flag and an indication, Mercola believes, that WHO is planning a global vaccination database and global vaccine passport.
“COVID ‘vaccination’ status was not considered a private medical matter at all during 2021 and 2022, yet mainstream media now want you to believe that your COVID jab status is protected by medical privacy laws,” he writes. “What a joke.”
Mercola points out Deep State plans in both the private and public sectors to implement health tracking and relax or drop privacy concerns. Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush of Illinois introduced H.R. 6666 (isn’t that number interesting?) in 2020 to authorize HHS (Health and Human Services) contact tracing — among other draconian dictates — during the so-called pandemic.
And just last year, the Biden administration attempted to hand over control of our national healthcare policies to WHO at the assembly’s 75th annual meeting in May. Though delegates rejected his proposals, they are working on a pandemic treaty that will greenlight the globalist agency to impose dictates at its whim in the name of public health. These days, that can mean anything from Covid to climate change, from gun violence to racism.
“Think long and hard before you close your eyes to the possibility that this is all part of [a] biosecurity-based totalitarian control grid,” warns Mercola.
