Why is the former President’s Vaccination Card a public document?

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2023/73968

In 2021, at the height of the biggest health crisis the world had experienced since the 1918-1919 pandemic, vaccines with a high degree of safety and effectiveness were produced in record time, and began to be distributed around the world. The then President of of Brazil, who since the beginning of the health crisis had been promoting a false speech trying to minimize the severity of the new disease and the health crisis, as well as promoting false cures such as the use of proven ineffective medicines to treat the new coronavirus, an anti-vaccination campaign began in that year. His speeches, his lines and his gestures were clearly intended to embed doubt in people about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine in Brazil. At the same time, he consistently stated that he had not been vaccinated and would not be vaccinated. Many began to wonder about the existence of evidence about the occurrence of vaccination or not, but the government always denied requests for access to information, claiming that it was a sensitive personal document. The purpose of this article is to build an argument about why the vaccination card of a President of the Republic is, at least in this context of COVID, a document of a public nature, which should be publicly accessible to any and all interested parties. I come to this by developing the following premises: public agents in general and the President of the Republic in particular have a reduced expectation of privacy; the words, gestures and attitudes of the President of the Republic have concrete influences on people and, in the context of the
pandemic, may have caused preventable deaths; the information contained in the Past President's immunization record is required for accountability purposes; the consent of the holder of sensitive personal information makes it public.