Man in Germany Gets 90 COVID-19 Shots to Sell Forged Passes
BERLIN — A 60-year-old man allegedly had himself vaccinated against COVID-19 dozens of times in Germany in order to sell forged vaccination cards with real vaccine batch numbers to people not wanting to get vaccinated themselves.
Magdeburg is an eastern German city. His name has not been released due to German privacy laws. The victim was said to have had up to 90 shots at COVID-19 vaccination centers in Eastern Saxony over several months before being caught by criminal police.
Although the suspect wasn’t taken into custody, they are being investigated for document fraud and unauthorized vaccination card issuance.
When he arrived for a COVID-19 injection for the second time in a row at a Eilenburg vaccination centre in Saxony, he was stopped by police. He was taken into custody by police, who confiscated his blank vaccine cards and began criminal proceedings.
It was not immediately clear what kind of impact the approximately 90 shots of COVID-19 vaccines, which were from different brands, had on the man’s personal health.
Recent raids by German police in relation to forgery of vaccination cards have been numerous. COVID-19 critics are refusing to be vaccinated here, while they also want access to many public venues, including restaurants, cinemas, and swimming pools.
Germany was hit with high numbers of infections for many weeks. But, there were numerous measures taken to stop the spread. While masks are not required for most public transport and in many grocery stores, it’s still required that you wear them on the streets.
In most schools across the country, students also no longer have to wear masks, which has led teachers’ associations to warn of possible conflicts in class.
“There is now a danger that, on the one hand, children who wear masks will be teased by classmates as wimps and overprotective or, on the other hand, pressure will be exerted on non-mask wearers,” Heinz-Peter Meidinger, the president of the German Teachers’ Association, told dpa. Both teachers and students could make a commitment to wearing masks at school and class until Easter, when the country will be on two weeks’ vacation.
Health experts say the most recent surge of infections in Germany — triggered by the BA.2 omicron subvariant— may have peaked.
On Sunday, the country’s disease control agency reported 74,053 new COVID-19 infections, less than a week ago, when the Robert Koch Institute registered 11,224 daily infections. On weekends, however, there is a lower number of infections.
Germany had 130,029 deaths from COVID-19.
___
Follow all AP stories on the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.
Here are more must-read stories from TIME