This information shared on VaxChat.org is not intended as a substitute for medical advice. The health information you share with us may be used for research, education, and to improve this system. We care about your privacy and will never ask you to share any personal information. Further, users should not enter sensitive or identifying information into the chatbot. If they do so, there is a risk to their privacy should there be a security breach.

We collect the following:

When people use VaxChat.org, VIRA on WhatsApp, or an embedded version of the chatbot, VIRA stores user queries to conduct research and statistical analysis about leading vaccine concerns of VIRA’s users. 

An anonymized corpus of text inputs to VIRA may be made available for validated researchers upon request. To ensure that no identifiable data appears in the data set, all data that could potentially be names, locations, phone numbers, birthdates, emails, and addresses will be scrubbed from the data set using automatic measures. The data set may be used to show how queries about COVID-19 vaccines changed during the pandemic and how the system responded.