German man gets 90 Covid shots to sell forged vaccine cards with real batch numbers

A German man allegedly got himself vaccinated against Covid-19 about 90 times in a bid to sell fake vaccination certificates carrying real vaccine batch numbers for people against inoculation.

The 60-year-old from central Germany’s Magdeburg received close to a hundred doses for months at vaccination centres in the Saxony state but was caught by police earlier this month.

Officials caught the sexagenarian at a vaccination centre in Eilenburg when he turned up for a Covid shot for the second day in a row. The police found several blank vaccination cards on him and have initiated criminal proceedings.

His name has not been disclosed due to the country’s privacy rules. The accused has not been arrested but is under investigation for issuing vaccination cards illegally and forging documents.

The man has received dozens of Covid jabs from different brands, and it is not immediately clear how these would impact his health.

Police in Germany have been carrying out several raids in the wake of reports about an increase in forged Covid vaccination passports in recent months amid vaccine hesitancy.

The European country has recorded a fresh wave of infections in the last one month, which health experts and authorities have blamed on BA.2 Omicron subvariant.

The country’s disease control agency confirmed 74,053 new Covid cases on Sunday due to the dominant Covid variant.

A total of 130,029 Covid deaths have been recorded since the beginning of the pandemic in Germany, official data shows.

Officials from the disease control body, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), said Germany appears to have crossed the peak of its Omicron wave.

“The peak of the wave has probably been reached, but the infection pressure remains very high with more than 1.5 million Covid-19 cases reported to the RKI within one week,” the institute said last week.