I’ve now twice seen people in my local townhall facebook groups that have not only been rabidly anti-vax/anti-covid (And in one case super misogynist) but also used the ‘I work in a hospital’ or ‘I’m a nurse’ as a fallacious appeal to authority.
In both cases I was really tempted screen shot what they were posting and send it over to their employer.
If they want to be anti-vax or anti-covid that’s one thing, but I just can’t see feeling so strongly about it that they’re willing to put their job on the line.
Not vaccination card, but the Canada Border Services Agency has found that at least 30 people have entered Canada with fake negative covid-19 tests. From the article linked:
According to Canada’s Quarantine Act, anyone caught with false test results could be fined up to CA$750,000 and spend six months in prison. If a passenger passes on the virus when in Canada, having used false documents to enter the country, they could be fined CA$1 million and spend three years in prison.
So pretty substantial penalities, even if it is in Canadian money.
I think this is the way to go. Prosecute it. Have strong penalties. A card should have on it the date, lot number and manufacturer of vaccine, and vaccine provider. A screening tool could perhaps be created that would flag information where vaccine manufacturer and/or lot number did not match the vaccination provider.
It should be relatively straightforward to prove that a particular person did not receive that vaccine from that provider on that date.*
*Hey, this gives me a chance to refute a claim that comes up sometimes in the legal context: you can’t prove a negative! To which I say, sure you can. It happens all the time. In this case, you call as a witness the records custodian for Shots-R-Us, and ask (in rough approximation):
“Are you the records custodian for Shots-R-Us?”
“Yes”
“Does Shots-R-Us keep meticulous records of everyone given a coronavirus vaccination?”
“Yes, as required by internal policies and procedures, medical ethics, and by law.”
“So if someone got vaccinated by Shots-R-Us, you would have a record of it?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a record of Jake Smith getting a Pfizer vaccination on March 31, 2021?”
“No.”
“Is there a record of Jake Smith getting any vaccination from Shots-R-Us on any date?”
“No.”
“No further questions.”
As far as I can tell, airlines are not requiring vaccination cards and I don’t think they are going to, at least not for domestic travel. For international travel the question will be up to the border policy.
My wild theory is that private institutions that require vaccination (e.g. cruises) might require vaccination in the same way that cruises currently ‘require’ that you not be sick. That is, they have a health attestation when you embark where you state that you aren’t sick and haven’t been sick for the last 48 hours. They don’t actually check. I feel this is a CYA move on their part and with Covid I think they and others will take the same tactic of ‘requiring’ vaccinations, but not really doing anything to check beyond asking the customer to check a box and sign their name.
This way they get to look good. If bad stuff goes down they can point fingers at the liars and gasp, “We are shocked (shocked!) to discover that our customers lied to us. Don’t blame us for the outbreak. Our policy is for vaccinated only.”
That would be an incredibly naive thing for them to think. I am rather certain they would like to go a year or two without a plague ship news story even with the dubiously beneficial excuse of blaming their customers.
I would be really surprised if cruise lines “required” vaccination and allowed you to simply state that you have been vaccinated. One reason is because I already have an example of a private institution (Citifield ) checking to make sure everyone entering meets their vaccination/testing requirements - the requirement is 14 days after your last dose and a friend of mine didn’t realize that he was only 13 days past his second dose. He had to take a rapid test before he was allowed in.
Another reason is because the CDC is apparently going to let them skip test cruises if the cruise line attests that a certain percentage of passengers and crew have been vaccinated- the cruise line itself will have to make the attestation and they will have no way to point fingers at he liars. This is why NCL is threatening not to sail from Florida.
The reason they let you attest that you haven’t been sick in the past 48 hours is because there is no way to prove you haven’t been sick in the last 48 hours. Not an issue with requiring vaccination. They used to let you simply state that you haven’t had a fever in the last 48 hours, but I’m pretty sure those days are gone too.
The nurse at the vax site misspelled my first name (quite badly*) when filling out the CDC card. If we wind up needing these things (which I doubt), I might be in the market.
*She wrote the first few letters of my first name, then completed it with letters from my last name. So if my name is Walter Massiv, she wrote Waltssiv Massiv. I didn’t even notice until the 15 minute observation period weeks later after my second shot.
This makes me think of those people who buy beer at the gas station in front of the grocery store parking lot when the grocery store sells the same cold beer for a cheaper price but a little more walking.
Someone on our Nextdoor neighborhood app reported that they ordered online a couple of plastic holders for their vaccination cards and that they were surprised that when they received them they had also received two blank vaccination cards. They didn’t post what site they had ordered them from as they didn’t want to encourage people acquiring blank vaccination cards and filling them out themselves.
I got emails from the California Dept. of Health after each of my shots.
However, there’s no sort of link to a database or confirmation code. All I have are dates, location and vaccine lot numbers.
No, in fact they emailed the supplier with a comment and the seller said it wasn’t them and they must have purchased them from someone else. I don’t even know if they paid an appropriate amount of money for the holders. You know, like if everyone else’s cost $9.99 but these are $30.00 for some reason wink.
The same thing happened to me. The ones I ordered from Walmart came with some cards that looked like vaccination cards on the front. The back of the cards was different, though, so someone probably would get caught if they tried to use them. I can’t remember exactly but I think the back of the card had an ad for the holders or something like that. I used a sharpie to write “void” on the front of the cards and tore them up before throwing them away.
According to what I read on the Nextdoor app the cards these people received were to their eyes identical to the official ones they already had. The conversation pretty rapidly devolved into a “No Vaccine Passports” shouting match so the original poster who started the whole conversation bowed out.
