Final month, Mayor Invoice de Blasio mentioned that town’s greater than 300,000 workers must get vaccinated or endure weekly testing, prompting some pushback from unions, which at the moment are in negotiations with the mayor’s workplace over the small print of implementation.
Regulation enforcement officers have completed what they’ll to crack down on fraud. Earlier this month, a Chicago-based pharmacist was arrested by federal brokers and charged with the sale of 125 vaccination playing cards to 11 completely different patrons on eBay. The earlier month, a naturopathic physician in California was charged with a scheme to falsely report her clients as having obtained the Moderna vaccine.
New York’s Legislature lately handed a invoice that will make it a state crime to falsify vaccination information. In an interview, State Senator Todd Kaminsky, one of many invoice’s sponsors, mentioned that counterfeit vaccine playing cards represented a rising menace.
“It was good foresight on our half to acknowledge that there have been going to be those that would forge vaccine playing cards and create a public well being hazard,” he mentioned.
@Tizzyent, the TikTok person who made a video about Ms. Clifford’s scheme this month, is an impartial filmmaker in Florida who requested that he solely be recognized by his first title, Michael, as a result of he had obtained threats for his movies previously. He mentioned in an interview that he had been preventing misinformation on social platforms for greater than a yr.
“It’s one thing that’s only a pet peeve,” he mentioned.
He mentioned that he had been alerted to a lot of individuals promoting counterfeit vaccine playing cards on social media, however that the @AntiVaxMomma scheme, for which she gave the impression to be recruiting collaborators when he stumbled upon one among her posts, appeared notably superior.
“A few days in the past, buddy of mine handed away from Covid,” he mentioned. “Once I see somebody providing a workaround like this that’s placing everybody in danger, it’s horrifying to me.”
Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.