The Vaccination Cards

It was a bad idea to make the vaccination cards paper and thus easily falsifiable. We need a real sophisticated vaccination proof system that can’t be counterfeited. There’s lots of right-wingers who will gladly pay for a fake card that allows them to get drunk in hot tubs with dozens of strangers but who won’t actually get vaccinated.

The focus group revealed another unexpected development: Most participants said they would want a fake vaccination card that would allow them to claim they had received shots, after Luntz granted them anonymity to speak honestly.

“One-thousand percent,” one woman said.

“If I have a fake vaccine card, yeah, I can go anywhere,” added a man who said he had turned down free New York Yankees tickets because of the team’s requirement to show proof of vaccination to attend games. Other participants said they wanted a fake card to attend concerts and go on trips, citing the growing number of organizations saying they will require proof of shots.

Even some participants who said they did not intend to get a fraudulent card acknowledged they were tempted. “My faith wouldn’t allow me to be deceitful. So what do I do?” one woman asked the group.

I dunno, get the goddamn vaccine?

It’s a real problem. And we are already seeing it come to light.

One listing offered eBay customers an “Authentic CDC Vaccination Record Card” for $10.99. Another promised the same but for $9.49. A third was more oblique, offering a “Clear Pouch For CDC Vaccination Record Card” for $8.99, but customers instead received a blank vaccination card (and no pouch).

All three listings were posted by the same eBay user, who goes by “asianjackson” — usingan account registered to a man who works as a pharmacist in the Chicago area — and all were illegal, federal regulators say. The account sold more than 100 blank vaccinationcards in the past two weeks, according to The Washington Post’s review of purchases linked to it.

The listings are a “perfect example” of burgeoning scams involvingcoronavirus vaccination cards that could undermine people’s safety, as well as the success of the nation’s largest mass vaccination effort, said North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein. Individuals might use them to misrepresent their vaccination status at school, work or in various living and travel situations, potentially exposing others to risk.

Stein, who led a recent effort with 47 colleagues demanding that eBay and other e-commerce platforms crack down on the scams,pointed to the FBI’s warning that anyone who makes or buys a fake vaccine card is breaking the law, and said he would consider prosecution, too.

“This is a concern that is national and bipartisan,” Stein added, saying the spread of fake vaccination cards “will extend the pandemic, resulting in more people sick and more people dead.”

The government should have recognized this and acted upon it. Even if the basic problem was already going to be there because Trump so borked all of this, Biden has had three months to work toward implementing something better. I do think one mistake he’s made so far is believing that most Americans are good and will do the right thing when that is so obviously not the case.