The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 supposedly protects confidential health information from public disclosure. That is one of its stated purposes. Like many sinkholes of cumbersome federal law and regulations, it wastes millions of hours for doctors and patients every year, but it does the job it is supposed to do. It is very hard to get someone else’s medical records unless you are their doctor, a parent, or an insurance company.
Back in 1996, this seemed an important goal, and perhaps it was. Since then, however, we have learned that public health authorities like state departments of health and the CDC, and private repositories of health information, like pharma companies and insurers, cannot be trusted to provide us with accurate and timely news on current health issues and crises. They also routinely cite HIPPA and vague considerations of “confidentiality” as their explanation for keeping us in the dark, and there’s not much we can do about it.
A recent example occurred in Pennsylvania when Governor Josh Shapiro announced, with press in attendance, that two people in Lancaster County had died from the measles. This was big news because, though there have been thousands of measles cases in the U.S. in 2026, there had been no measles deaths. (There are, however, three confirmed deaths from the MMR vaccine this year.)
Pushback was immediate. The first response was from the Coroner of Lancaster County, who noted that the determination of a measles death in Lancaster County, and its public disclosure, was his job, and there had been no such event. Based on this announcement, Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. questioned Shapiro’s actions and suggested that the Pennsylvania governor had fabricated the story for political reasons.
Then, despite repeated requests for details on the deaths, Shapiro clammed up and refused to divulge anything further, claiming it would violate some vague confidentiality concerns regarding the two dead people. All this despite the fact he personally had started the whole controversy by stepping outside of his authority and expertise to grab a headline with the first two (supposed), measles deaths of the year.
The invocation of HIPPA or other confidentiality concerns in this situation is, of course, absurd. HIPPA does prohibit the disclosure of health information until fifty years after a person’s death. However, literally NO ONE cares who these measles victims were---their names, addresses, religion, skin color…. The only thing anyone cares about is whether they had the measles and whether they died from it. But “confidentiality” is always the explanation of Shapiro and others who suddenly want the story to go away and don’t want anybody to know anything the authorities choose not to share with us.
HIPPA is routinely used this way by governments and pharma to conceal information of great interest to the public. Without access to critical information, we are given no choice in the matter and are forced to take the word of the CDC, the Shapiros of the world, and other public health “experts” on matters where the public should have the final say.
Dolly Parton’s rather sudden departure raised similar questions to which we will apparently never get the answers. We were only told she died after a “brief battle with cancer.” It is also well known she was an ardent advocate for COVID vaccines, took the vaccine herself, and contributed a million bucks to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center to speed the development of Moderna’s product. (She even changed the words of “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene” to “vaccine, vaccine, vaccine” to promote the jab.)
For those of us (i.e., half the country), who want the COVID vaccine banned because of the deaths and injuries it has caused, the words “brief battle with cancer” raise instant red flags, suggesting Dolly Parton died of a turbo cancer. These have not been definitively proven to be caused by COVID vaccines, but they did not exist before the mRNA vaccines were pushed on all of us. Turbo cancers, which are often breast cancers or colorectal cancers, behave in ways that do not resemble cancers with which we are familiar. They are so aggressive they can kill in days or weeks rather than months or years. Also, they often attack people in their 20s.
Whether Dolly Parton died of such a cancer is a matter of great public interest not because she was a superstar but because of the dangers we all may face from these vaccines. I can understand the desire of the family for privacy about her cause of death, but the importance of this information outweighs any confidentiality concerns. All of us have lived through a terrifying experience with COVID and COVID treatments that changed many lives and killed many people. To the extent HIPPA prevents us from learning the truth about her cancer and any recent COVID booster history, it is bad law, and should be changed.
Even more troubling was the secrecy that descended over the death of Hank Aaron.
On January 5, 2021, when the COVID vax was just being rolled out to the public, Hank Aaron took the jab on TV in Atlanta with civil rights figures Andrew Young and Louis Sullivan. Black people were especially suspicious of the vaccine, and the public inoculation was an attempt to allay some of the fears in that community.
Seventeen days later, on January 22, Aaron died in his sleep. He was 86 years old and had some health issues that 86-year-olds have, but he was not sickly or dangerously ill or suffering from any fatal disease.
Questions arose immediately about the vaccine, and the Moorehouse Medical Clinic, which had organized the public event, stated: “His passing was not related to the vaccine, nor did he experience any side effects from the immunization.” This added to the problem, of course, since the Moorehouse Medical Clinic had no apparent basis for either assertion. Other public health authorities in Atlanta then stated that Aaron had died of “natural causes,” but no actual cause of death was ever announced.
Aaron’s death occurred at a time when the COVID vax had just been given an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), but people all over the world were concerned about its safety. Complete and accurate information about Aaron’s death and the effect of the experimental vaccine would have been immensely helpful to those of us trying to decide whether the shot was safe for us and our families, but the response of politicians and health authorities and pharma companies was simply, ”Trust us. Nothing to see here. We will tell you what’s best for you.” And they had HIPPA to fall back on. The information the world wanted would be sealed for fifty years.
During the COVID madness, public health authorities and pharma companies routinely used HIPPA to prevent any effective examination of their claims that millions were dying from the disease rather than from other conditions or from the vaccine. If you had COVID, or had had it recently, or had one of the multitude of false-positive PCR tests, and you died, COVID was the official cause of death and that was that. “But wasn’t he 93 years old with congestive heart failure?” you might ask. “Yes, but the death certificate says COVID, you see. No further information will be forthcoming.”
And then there was Bronny.
Bronny James, eldest son of LeBron James, was a student and basketball player at USC when, at a basketball practice on July 24, 2023, he collapsed from a cardiac arrest. Bronny survived, and the attack was later attributed to an unspecified congenital heart defect, but none of the obvious questions about the incident were ever answered.
One of the more well-known, and terrifying, side-effects of the mRNA vaccines is myocarditis, especially in men. During the pandemic, recently-vaccinated young male athletes collapsed and died on soccer pitches and other sports venues around the globe. So it was natural to wonder whether Bronny had recently gotten a COVID booster, especially since USC had imposed a vax mandate on every student. Sorry, we were never going to get an answer to that one. Just asking the question marked you as a kook.
The same questions arose when Damar Hamlin, a safety for the Buffalo Bills, suffered a heart attack on January 2, 2023, in a Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals. And again, not only did the questions never get answered, but the people asking the questions were mocked as anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.
And the COVID vaccines are not the only area where governments and pharma companies (but I repeat myself), use “confidentiality” to conceal critical information from the public.
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) drugs have been around for almost forty years, since Prozac (from Eli Lilly) hit the market in 1988. Pfizer’s Zoloft and GSK’s Paxil soon followed. Supposedly, these anti-depressants could do almost anything and were marketed as being capable of changing fundamental aspects of one’s personality. Lose your shyness! Demand a promotion! Stop smoking!
Pharma companies were criticized for the hype, and for failing to investigate possible side-effects, especially when studies emerged that showed a link between SSRIs and homicidal urges. Lawsuits followed, with SSRIs found legally responsible for several specific killings.
One of the first involved an Australian man who killed his wife after he was prescribed Zoloft---a judge found the man not guilty because he acted under the influence of the drug. In a Wyoming case, a man killed his wife, children, and himself 48 hours after being put on SSRIs, leading to an award of damages from GSK.
(A brief aside here. We all watch drug commercials with long lists of side-effect warnings ranging from heart problems to vision loss to joint soreness to memory issues, and I don’t take them any more seriously than you do---“Oh, it’s just the lawyers talking.” But one of the side effects of SSRIs, almost from the beginning, was that people who take them MAY KILL OTHER PEOPLE! And I know it doesn’t happen very often, but if it happens once, isn’t that a reason to stop selling the damn things??? I mean, it’s not an upset tummy. It’s not the runs. It’s not insomnia. Yet somehow the SSRIs are still out there because…because…well, I guess innocent people being murdered is just one of those occasional side-effects we all need to accept---sort of like diarrhea, only more permanent.)
Yet despite the proven link between SSRIs and violent crimes, we are never told whether a particular psycho-killer was taking these drugs when he went on his spree. HIPPA protects his confidential health information for fifty years after his death (usually by suicide). Coincidentally, HIPPA also protects the manufacturers and the prescribers of SSRIs from any responsibility to the victims or their families.
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho perpetrated the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history when he killed 32 and wounded 17 before killing himself at Virginia Tech University. Cho had had numerous visits with mental health professionals and had been diagnosed with severe anxiety problems. And though some of his health records were released two years after his rampage, his treatment and medications (or lack thereof), were never revealed.
The question may legitimately be asked about any recent mass killer. Was there a prior mental health history (often there was), and was the killer taking SSRI anti-depressants? Yet the information is never released to the public.
Why not?
Today, there is a particular group of troubled people---transgenders---and we are not permitted any information about their prescriptions and drug intake even after they have committed multiple murders.
A study of gender dysphoria patients from 2005 to 2021 found that 40% of them had been put on SSRIs at one time or another. About individuals, however, we know nothing.
Harvey Marcelin killed three people, in 1963, 1986, and 2022. Audrey Hale killed six at the Covenant School in Nashville in 2023. Snochi Mosely killed three co-workers at Rite-Aid in 2018. All were known transgenders and potentially on SSRIs. But were they? And if so, could the drugs have driven them to violence? Under current law, we will never know.
The motives behind the passage of HIPPA may have been noble at the time, and even justifiable, but we have since learned the dangers of giving government officials and their allies tools to keep us ignorant of data we need to make decisions on critical issues of public health. One of the primary lessons of the COVID debacle was that the power-hungry will use their lock on information to control us, punish dissenters, and enrich themselves and their allies.
I am not here to present a comprehensive plan on how parts of HIPPA should be repealed and other parts amended, and I don’t deny that individuals can have legitimate privacy interests in their medical information. However, these interests should largely disappear upon the death of the individual, and they should disappear entirely if the person died while committing murders or other violent crimes. In addition, when there is a case like Dolly Parton or Hank Aaron, whose deaths raised serious issues of public health, there must be a procedure available for the public, or journalists, to argue that a compelling public interest overrides the desires of the family for silence.
HIPPA, like many massive programs borne of federal legislation, has become a system where the unintended consequences now overwhelm its original innocent-sounding purposes. It was supposed to protect you and me. Instead, it protects pharma companies, nameless bureaucrats, and insurance companies from any liabilities for their lethal mistakes.
Copyright2026MichaelKubacki
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