Man in Germany caught getting 90 COVID shots to forge cards for anti-vaxxers
He got nabbed for being jabbed.
A man in the German city of Magdeburg got himself vaccinated at least 90 times against COVID-19, authorities there said Sunday. His reason for doing so was not for health, but to accumulate vaccine cards to sell.
German privacy protocols prevented the release of the man’s name, but he is accused of receiving the dozens of shots at vaccination centers in the eastern state of Saxony for months before he was finally caught this month, The Associated Press reported Sunday, citing the German news wire dpa.
The man was caught at a vaccination center in Eilenburg, Saxony, when he arrived for a COVID shot for a second day running, carrying blank vaccination cards that police confiscated.
He was not detained because receiving the vaccines is not a crime in and of itself, but he is being investigated for unauthorized issuance of vaccination cards and document forgery, AP said, and criminal proceedings are underway for that.
While health experts generally say that getting extra jabs will not harm health, those comments have never applied to dozens of shots. The health effects of that many inoculations are not known.
“Most of the time, your risk of serious side effects does not increase if you get extra doses of a vaccine,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says on its website.
Any risk is related to the time interval between them rather than the vaccine themselves, the CDC said.
“In these cases, it is the spacing of the doses, not the number of doses, that creates the risk,” the CDC said, referencing pneumococcal vaccine and the DTaP for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, but not COVID. “These reactions can be unpleasant, but they are not life-threatening.”
The effects of such a large number of COVID vaccines on the man’s health were not known, AP said.
Germany has been lifting coronavirus restrictions even as cases continue to slay hundreds per day. There were 74,053 new COVID-19 infections logged on Sunday by Germany’s version of the CDC, down from 111,224 daily infections reported a week ago, AP said. At least 130,029 people have died of the novel coronavirus in Germany to date, AP said.