Holders of fake COVID-19 vaccination cards can mislead medical workers in administering care, should they become hospitalised, Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony said today. He added that this can also confuse the gathering of data because it will give health officials a ‘false sense’ of the situation on the ground.
“One of the big challenges that we can potentially have is somebody who obtains a fake card if they get sick with COVID, and they end up in the hospital, it can give us a false sense that this person is vaccinated when they never took a vaccine to begin with. This can skew the results that we are getting, because we’ll expect that persons who are vaccinated should be doing much better, but unfortunately if they fake these cards, we’ll have these types of challenges,” he said.
Vaccination is now a mandatory requirement for some sections of the population. Persons must be vaccinated to gain access to walk-in services at all governmental and privately-owned agencies and businesses. Two persons have already been arrested for the illegal possession of vaccination cards. The Minister has vowed that such misdemeanors will not be tolerated and that perpetrators will face the full brunt of the law. He said that the police are currently investigating several cases of stolen/forged vaccination cards.
“I’m aware that there are about eight to 10 other cases that the police are investigating, and I’m sure that when those investigations are completed, those persons would be placed before the courts. We do get reports from people who would tell us that at this particular site or at that site people are forging or selling vaccination cards, and when we do get those reports, we treat them very seriously. We would normally ask the police to investigate.”
Minister Anthony is appealing to the public to inform the Ministry and police of such practices.
