Looks like Donald Trump just committed a serious HIPAA violation
Donald Trump has murdered more than seventy thousand Americans so far this year, and he committed treason by conspiring with the Kremlin to rig his own election to begin with, so perhaps we should have expected he’d commit something as comparatively parenthetical as a HIPAA privacy violation as well. But it appears he’s just done precisely that.
HIPAA laws protect Americans against having their medical information being involuntarily disclosed to third parties. When Donald Trump announced today that a Mike Pence staffer named “Katie” had tested positive for coronavirus, it gave away that he was talking about Pence’s press secretary Katie Miller. Trump isn’t a doctor, but he is Miller’s employer, meaning he’s not legally allowed to announce something like this.
So unless Katie Miller specifically gave Donald Trump permission to announce this, he violated HIPAA privacy laws. Worse, multiple reporters are now revealing on Twitter that they already knew Miller was the one who tested positive before Trump blurted it out, but they had declined to report her name for privacy reasons. This is a reminder that there isn’t anything Trump can’t screw up.
