Landry disapproves of Edwards' decision to share student COVID-19 cases with LDH

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is displeased with Gov. John Bel Edward's decision to require schools to report positive COVID cases to the Louisiana Department of Health.

Thursday, Landry indicated on his Facebook page that he believes this transfer of data violates the HIPAA privacy rule which establishes national standards to protect individuals' medical records and other personal health information.

"This is not the school collecting data and then sending it to the Department of Health," said Landry. "This is one department sharing information to another department. In many cases, this data is being collected by licensed nurses who absolutely have to abide by HIPAA."

Landry says parents were not made aware of their children's medical information being shared prior to the start of school. He feels Edwards should have notified parents.

"Never once did he explain to parents prior to the kids going to school this year that they were going to be requiring their schools to report specific information specific about their child to a different agency," said Landry.

Landry says as the state attorney general, he believes he should have been a part of the decision-making process regarding the release of personal health records to the Louisiana Department of Health.

"What is the most concerning part is that there was evidently a discussion between two state agencies and the governor's office as to the collection of data on children and yet our office was never consulted," he said.