2532: Censored Vaccine Card

|< < Prev Comic #2532 (October 22, 2021) Next > >|

Censored Vaccine Card

Title text: CVS's pharmacies are fine, but I much prefer their [censored]s.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a B[censored]T. Would be nice to have explanations of what each censored part likely says. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

This comic is loosely related to a series of comics related to the 2020 pandemic of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.

The comic hinges on the sharing of vaccination card photos on social media as proof that the user has been vaccinated against COVID-19 (in this case, gotten a booster shot, a third dose of the vaccine). When the first U.S. recipients had their vaccine, a large number shared photos of the CDC vaccination card; it was enough of a trend that the FTC released an official statement warning vaccine recipients not to share photos due to the cards containing personal identification that should probably not be made public.

The irony here is that Randall has "censored" some impersonal lines, such as the instructions that are identical on all vaccination cards, and many easy-to-guess lines, while not censoring any of said personal information. The fourth line, labelled "other" is probably completely blank (as the third dose was on the day immediately prior to the publication one), but is completely blacked out.

The caption indicates that his intention is to "seem more mysterious". This is best exemplified by blanking most of the word "clinician" to leave the acronym "CIA", referring to a US government agency known for its frequently "mysterious" (classified) activity, as well as its liberal use of redaction like that in the comic.

This is the first comic including a sentence in Spanish.

Randall's patient number is the 2nd to 9th digits of the fractional part of the decimal expansion of pi inclusively: 41592653

The lot numbers of the first and second doses allude to two numbers that appear frequently in Star Wars and other works related to George Lucas: 1138, and 2187. The lot number of the third dose is the Ramanujan-Hardy number.

If the partially censored year relates to the twentieth century, which is a reasonable assumption,^{[citation needed]} the date of birth on the card corresponds to the date of birth given in an earlier version of his English wikipedia article (other languages still do). It is unclear if the author plays into a prior misdirection or has used his actual birthday.

CVS Pharmacy is a pharmacy chain in the US which provides COVID-19 vaccinations.

The title text comments on the "Provider or clinic site" of the second dose on the card. Where the word "pharmacy" appears in the previous row (and would be on a real card), it is censored in the comic. The most reasonable assumption is that the word is still "pharmacy" and that Randall has simply chosen to redact that instance for some reason, but the title text humorously implies that it was in fact some other CVS-related venture where he got his second dose, for instance a "CVS Parking lot" or perhaps an anti-submarine warfare carrier.

CVS's parent company, CVS Health, does have other enterprises with compatible names: CVS Caremark and CVS Specialty. However, neither of these provide COVID-19 vaccinations.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Profile picture with squiggles lines on its left.]

Check it out, I just got my booster!

[Picture of the U.S. COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card attached on a media post. The card includes pre-printed information in black and handwritten information in blue, the latter indicated here by italics. Some of the text has been blacked out, indicated here by "[Censored]".]

COVID-[Censored] Vaccination record card

[At the upper right of the card appears the logo of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a stylized eagle surrounded by the words "Department of Health & Human Services USA", although those words are not legible in this drawing. Next to that appears the logo of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a shaded box with the letters "CDC" and the words "Centers for Disease Control and [Censored]" below it.]

Please keep this record card, which includes [Censored]

about [Censored]

Por favor, guarde esta tarjeta de registro, que incluve [Censored]

[Censored] sobre [Censored]

Munroe Randall

---

Last Name First Name

10-17-[Censored]84 41592653

---

Date of birth Patient number

Vaccine	Manufacturer lot number	Date	Provider or clinic site
1st Dose COVID-[Censored]	Pfizer ER1138	04/01/21 MM DD YY	CVS Pharmacy Clinician #5309
2nd Dose COVID-[Censored]	Pfizer ES2187	04/22/21 MM DD YY	CVS [Censored] [Censored]
Other	3rd dose [Censored] FH1729	10/21/21 MM DD YY	[Censored] [Censored] [Censored]CIA[Censored]
Other	[Censored]	[Censored]/[Censored]/[Censored] MM DD YY	[Censored]

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

Huh,his birthday was a week ago. Happy belated brithday!162.158.48.115 04:03, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

What if this card is from the future and Cuedall is legitimately censoring his fourth dose. 162.158.255.43 22:38, 22 October 2021 (UTC) Running Gazelle

Numbers: Patient number is digits of pi after 3.1; 1138 and 2187 seem to be Star Wars references; 5309 is...Jenny? and 1729 is the Ramanujan-Hardy number. Clam (talk) 23:16, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

I should be used to it by now (several decades of personal exposure to it) but I *still* have to double-take at dates in the illogical MM-DD-(YY)YY format. 162.158.155.161 23:34, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. This "mixed endian" format makes no sense.172.68.133.105 19:43, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I prefer D-YY-M-D-Y-M-Y (for example, for January 13, 2021, I would put 1-20-0-3-2-1-1) 172.70.211.193 04:41, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

This is timely for me, I'm getting my booster tomorrow. Barmar (talk) 00:32, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

The date of birth corresponds to the date formerly on Randall's Wikipedia article, which never had an acceptable citation (only a now irretrievable wiki). The year is cited there, but not the rest. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:42, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

The sleuths at English Wikipedia retrieved the wiki. The context does make it highly likely that this is Randall's real birth date. --108.162.219.105 21:04, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Randall's pretty young. I wonder (it's none of my business, of course) whether he got a booster because his wife is a cancer survivor. Nitpicking (talk) 03:05, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

"This is the first comic including a sentence in Spanish." Well, it includes most of the sentence in Spanish, but it not a complete Spanish sentence, because it is heavily redacted. So there has not actually been a Spanish sentence in XKCD yet. Nutster (talk) 04:15, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I've added the rest of the text to the transcript, but someone who knows wiki markup and/or transcript convention better than me should definitely revise the formatting. Esogalt (talk) 07:46, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I was wondering why is Randal still using CVS, surely by now he has migrated to git? 162.158.159.105

Don't know if this is a joke about code repositories or not, but CVS is a pharmacy chain in the US. 172.69.34.87 09:21, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I've added this to the explanation. Esogalt (talk) 09:36, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

This feels very SCP-esque. 172.69.214.17 17:31, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

[REDACTED] 172.69.68.106 23:23, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

It's interesting that the censor bars are parallel to the card, rather than the photo of the card, implying either a painstaking attention to detail (not implausible for Randall), or that he has actually physically blacked out the information on the card itself. Esogalt (talk) 17:37, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

The entire image of Randal's card is a drawing, BTW. These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 04:05, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, my analysis was "in character", so to speak. Esogalt (talk) 05:02, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Doesn't that say "Clinician #5309"? that would not refer to the store, but to the employee who administered the shot. Nitpicking (talk) 02:43, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to describe it as a redacted vaccination card rather than censored? Barmar (talk) 13:45, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

If it has been wafted through the purifying smoke of a thurible (there's no indication it hasn't!) we could say it has been censered..? 141.101.107.81 15:37, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I dislike that the explanation is taken the comic extremely literal. In several places it refers to Randall and seems to identify Randall with the author of the comic, for instance when pointing out a place of living not mentioned in the comic. This is in particular crucial when it comes to the date of birth, which coincides with the date of birth typically assigned to the author of the comic. However, the English Wikipedia sees insufficient evidence in the public record to name his birthday. --162.158.93.214 05:42, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

I mean, Randall Munroe is both the name on the card and the author of the comic, but I would agree(?) that xkcd Randall is more of a fictionalisation of Real Life Randall. I don't see a problem with comparing the locations though -- what would a less literal interpretation look like to you? There was some back-and-forth on the birth date thing, and I think someone took Randall's page on this wiki as a reliable source, which isn't proper (though it's an entertaining example of citogenesis).

There was already a mention of the last line being blank; yours felt a bit easier to read so I've attempted to merge them. Esogalt (talk) 07:30, 26 October 2021 (UTC)