- Concerns are growing over the proliferation of fake COVID-19 vaccination cards.
- Officials point out that selling or owning such a card is a crime and can result in serious legal penalties.
- They add that the cards are also a health threat, causing the spread of COVID-19 from unvaccinated people.
- Experts recommend people with legitimate vaccination cards keep an extra copy. They also say the cards shouldn’t be laminated in case information needs to be updated.
There’s a new kind of fake ID card appearing on college campuses with wider health implications than the traditional ones allowing a 19-year-old to sneak into the campus pubs.
As schools reopen for fall all over the nation, officials are seeing fake vaccination cards popping up in situations in which class registration or event attendance requires a student to be vaccinated.
With the Delta variant causing COVID-19 numbers to surge again, there’s concern that false cards are just another factor with which health and campus officials must grapple as the pandemic starts affecting its third school year.
Many of the false documents are being sent to the United States from overseas on a nightly basis. On August 13, customs and border patrol officials in Memphis, Tennessee, said they seized 121 packages from Shenzen, China, containing more than 3,000 fake vaccination cards.
Officials first spotted the forgeries because they weren’t marked as official documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They also had errors, including misspellings, unfinished words, and incorrect Spanish translations, according to a statement released by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
“These vaccinations are free and available everywhere,” said Michael Neipert, the Area Port director in Memphis, in the statement. “If you do not wish to receive a vaccine, that is your decision. But don’t order a counterfeit, waste my officers’ time, break the law, and misrepresent yourself.”
“CBP officers at the Area Port of Memphis remain committed to stopping counterfeit smuggling and helping to protect our communities. But just know that when you order a fake vax card, you are using my officers’ time as they also seize fentanyl and methamphetamines,” he said.
The proliferation of fake vaccination cards prompted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to recommend that the federal officials crack down on the problem.
He noted that vaccines are free while the fake cards can be quite expensive.
Source: healthline