MAY YOU ask your dentist if she or he is vaccinated against COVID-19?
By all means. For that matter, you can ask doctors, health care front liners and medical professionals the same. And other people you come in close contact.
Many health authorities even encourage that you should. It is one’s right to information (and protection).
For privacy to protect health information (and good manners as well) no reply is required. It is the other person’s right as well.
As with all private matters of confidentiality, medical information should remain confidential. Unless and until you give your consent. Our Data Privacy law provides as much.
Having said that, every Filipino also has the right and the obligation to ask the question – for their own health and safety.
Allyson Chiu, writing in The Washington Post, says it’s okay to ask healthcare providers (and even the hairstylist) about their vaccination status.
It is important, she says, when people go to places such as a doctor’s clinic where social distancing is not possible and where they have to take off their masks.
“Not only do they have the legal right, but I think they have an obligation to their own health and safety to ask the question,” Lawrence Gostin, Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post. “It’s an entirely appropriate and logical question to ask if someone is going to be in very close, personal contact with you: whether they’ve been vaccinated.”
“It’s awkward, but it’s not illegal,” Robert Gatter, a Professor at the Center for Health Law Studies at Saint Louis University’s School of Law, told the newspaper. “If they share it with you, that’s their choice.”
We are of the opinion that dentists, doctors and health front line workers should be honest about their vaccination status.
After all, they are in close contact with people and patients; close contact is a proven route for potential COVID transmission.
It is also ethical for health care front liners to disclose their vaccination status. After all, it is simply fair for people to know who they are in close contact with, especially if they are in danger of possible COVID infection.
Healthcare front liners should know that the interest of the patient is very important.
The bottom line, for everybody’s sake, is for both patients and health care providers to get vaccinated.
Health care workers are on the priority of list for COVID vaccination. So are essential workers. The same goes for the elderly.
So get the jab.
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Dr. Joseph D. Lim is the former Associate Dean of the UE College of Dentistry, former Dean of the College of Dentistry, National University, past president and honorary fellow of the Asian Oral Implant Academy, and honorary fellow of the Japan College of Oral Implantologists and Honorary Life Member of Thai Association of Dental Implantology. For questions on dental health, e-mail jdlim2008@gmail.com or text 0917-8591515./PN
