Employers should be able to query the vaccination status of their employees wherever particularly vulnerable people are cared for or where many people come together in a confined space. But there are restrictions.
The parliamentary groups of the Union and SPD agreed with the federal government on Thursday that employers should be given the right to information about the vaccination or convalescence status of their employees – but only in selected, particularly endangered areas such as nursing homes. This emerges from the draft amendment to the Infection Protection Act, which the Bundestag is to pass on Tuesday. The corresponding formulation aid for the amendment proposed by the government groups was the Süddeutsche Zeitung before.
The draft states that in the future employers will be able to process “personal data of an employee about his vaccination and serostatus” with regard to Covid-19, “in order to decide about the establishment of an employment relationship or the manner of employment”. This relaxation of health data protection is limited to institutions and companies in which people particularly at risk from Corona are cared for or where many people simply come together in a small space: nursing homes and homes for the elderly, facilities for the disabled, accommodation for the homeless and asylum seekers, mass accommodation such as those for There are seasonal workers, care services, prisons and schools as well as day care centers, homes and holiday camps. Vaccination inquiries are already possible in hospitals, in outpatient care and in medical practices.
A prerequisite for the vaccination query is that the Bundestag has determined the epidemic emergency – and that the query itself “to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease-2019” is required.
The employers had demanded a general right to inquire about the vaccination status for the duration of the pandemic. Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) made it clear on Friday that he too would have wished for more. “For example, for working in an open-plan office and for organizing work, it makes sense if the employer knows what the vaccination status is in each case,” he said on Deutschlandfunk. Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) was also convinced “that further steps are necessary and necessary”. On the other hand, the Social Democrats had slowed down. On Friday, the SPD health politician Sabine Dittmar called the compromise “right”, but stressed that employees basically have the right to refuse information about health issues.