I can tell you as a first responder, it doesn't matter. The "vaccine" is a damn joke. I am F**ing exhausted this morning, and I don't care anymore. We are being run in the ground across the country with people quitting left and right.<p>Fake vaccine cards are the least of our worries. You heard it here first. The emergency medical system is in deep trouble for way too many reasons to enumerate here.<p>Anecdote time; I responded to the same 200 person retirement home 3 times last night (Thus the "grumpy" tude). "Mask up" signs everywhere, every employee wearing a mask properly, NO visitors for the past month, etc. AND the place is at least 80% infected with Covid. Every resident is "fully vaccinate with boosters"!<p>The eldery that live there are pissed, we are pissed and the staff is running on fumes. They were told they were getting a vaccine... their definition of vaccine doesn't include still getting the disease, but just a little less sever (which, incidentally has NOT been the case for a lot of them). That doesn't make sense to them or me if I am being honest.<p>They are sick, some of them really sick. There isn't much we can do except to give them options... stay home and fight the fever/sickness yourself or go to ER and wait for hours (depending on severity of symptoms). We are waiting for transports to the ER for an hour or more as the wall time at ER's explodes due to staffing shortages across the board.<p>I don't see a difference between what I saw in April, May and June of 2020 and now, with respect to Covid... with the exception of less people willing to work at ER's and EMS. Call numbers are UP massively as everyone thinks covid is going to kill them instantly. Its like people forgot how to take care of a common cold as was the case when Covid hit initially. Treat the fever, drink fluids the second you start feeling bad... don't wait until you have a 104 temp to start taking care of yourself.<p>I am so jaded with how bad people are at doing ANYTHING for themselves. I often wonder how people have made it to the age of 60, 75, 80 with the kinds of lifestyles I see out there. SO MANY OBESE PEOPLE. SO MANY. You wonder why you are sick? really?
This is a direct result of the (intentionally) punitive nature of vaccine mandates. Broad, heavy-handed actions by the government are the classic spark for societal backlash. A softer approach that focused on positive benefits for having a vax pass versus punishing unvaxxed would probably had better results. Instead, we've pushed (presumably) otherwise law-abiding citizens into using forged documents. This directly undermines the legitimacy of the government - people lose respect for an authority that cannnot enforce its own orders, and these people will be more likely to carry out similar acts of defiance in the future. Considering the political polarization in America, this is not a recipe for success.
Validating seems to be so lackluster that I'm not sure fake card producers are even an issue currently. Any time I've had to validate my vax status in order to get into some establishment, either a crappy photocopy or a digital photo of the card on my phone has been accepted without even blinking. Typically they don't even look at the info, they just see you wave something that looks vaguely right at them and they're satisfied.
I am amazed that anyone would spend hundreds of dollars to get replica of a handwritten paper card with zero security features of which there are millions of originals floating around.<p>I guess the people who don't really understand how vaccines work also overlap with with people who don't understand how paper cards with no security features work.
It's not even the vaccine part of a vaccine card that bothers me the most. I just don't want to expand the "papers, please" part of living in a society. Every little thing shouldn't need verification.
I highly disagree with this. In fact, I think the best thing for the world is more fake ids. So we can search for true vectors of disease, such as MRNA gene therapies that are not fully tested.<p>Passports are just a means to move to a social credit score. Which is horrifying in its implications.
This will obviously happen when there is no enforcement against it. If the last two years showed us anything it’s that the federal and state governments are all talk when it comes to COVID and can’t be bothered to enforce any of their so-called mandates.<p>You know what would help fight these forgeries? Visible consequences for producing and possessing them.
That’s because the vaccine cards were never designed to authenticate vaccine status. It was literally an appointment reminder mechanism. In fact, a PDF of the blank card was available from the CDC website.
Who could have guessed a piece of cardstock would be a poor means of verification. No one seems to have thought these through and few seem to be taking it seriously.
My nana lived a long and good life. When I was a little boy, I discovered that she's actually one year older than her official documents suggest. She revealed that it was not done by a mistake or a typo, but by a deliberate action. The story was that in the early 1940s the village she was living in was under German occupation and young people were being conscripted into "labor camps" and transferred to Reich mainland. So her family pulled all the strings, bribed all right people to make a "correction" to the documents in a way indistinguishable from original record. The war was over in a few years, but nobody bothered to "fix" the fake record.<p>By the way, German administration at the time wanted to be seen as "liberators from communist oppression". The conscription was promoted as highly noble thing, beneficial for the "New Order". Those joining "labor camps" were celebrated. There were bounties set for dobbing in partisans ("bandits"). Although collaborators were many, nonetheless many others, lacking the necessary connections to obtain fake ausweiss, chose to fight the "liberators" with all the rage they could muster. Many paid the ultimate price. If my grandma's document forgery was revealed, the whole family would be in line for execution. By no means it was an "easier" option than conscription, but certainly "easier" than fully joining "people's avengers".<p>I believe when the matter is perceived as life-and-death, the lack of "easier" option to take out a fake document may very well push some people into full-blood fight. You don't need many of them before society falls into a bloody war. So, the prevalence of fake vaccine certificates may be not a problem, but a blessing in disguise. If one is willing to consider a possible alternative.
The US government's inability to deploy effective mobile validation apps like China is a feature, not a bug. A "legit" handwritten card signed by someone at Walgreens is inherently untrustworthy.
Good. No one verifies this crap anyway. Even in Israel where it's a digitally signed government issued token, nobody has actually ever verified it (that I've seen). Only at the airport, maybe.
If one of the goals of the vaccine passport is to partition the vaccinated from the unvaccinated (i.e i don't want to put my patrons at risk by allowing someone sick to enter my shop) then I suspect fraud is at the bottom of a long list of other more important issues that undermine said goal.<p>In order for vaccine passports to be effective, they need to be full-scale, uniform, and zero-tolerance. For ex. Australia does this high effect.<p>But in the U.S. every state, business, and household has a different set of rules and they've been making it up as they go. This has resulted in numerous non-fraud scenarios where the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups mingle, and supposedly exchange the virus. Ex. Grocery stores, schools, holiday dinners and parties<p>Our approach has been so federated that I can't imagine any meaningful improvements can be attributed to the passports. Inversely I can't imagine any real negative effects can be attributed to fraud.
The "public health nightmare" is that such a thing is so easily faked, on top of the fact that no one looks anyway. Has anyone ever seen a QR code being scanned? No? Just wave a screenshot of your friend's digital vaccination record? Yeah, that works. Why even bother with fake cardboard representations? Post that screenshot (with the QR code replaced by a rickroll URL) to your Telegram channel, sorted.<p>But just now with the pearl-clutching? Because when they handed me my card almost a year ago, I almost didn't hang on to it because my first thought was, "well, no one is going to accept <i>that</i> as proof of vaccination. I could have photocopied it for all anyone knows." Turns out...
As long as there's <i>some</i> mechanism to identify the fraudulent cards people can be held accountable for trying to pass off a fake as the real thing. Making, selling, or using a fake vaccination card is a felony.<p>Can <i>just anybody</i> call up say, Walmart and verify if a vaccination card supposedly filled out by them is authentic? If not then that's the issue. Not the fact that fakes exist.
Philosophical & Cynical View: What I have learned in this world is if you have enough money you can fake 99% thing.<p>The only problem is faking efficiently.
Does it feel like it was pretty deliberate that these vaccine cards were designed in such a way as to be relatively easy to fake - or at the very lease, not designed to be hard to copy. I'm always impressed when I go to Mexico about the quality of the immigration card with the embossed/hologram like headers, that you get. If vaccine cards had looked like that it would have reduced counterfeits significantly. I'm 100% in on vaccine mandates, and mask mandates, and (hyper-local) lockdowns when appropriate - but I'm also really glad the United States didn't go all big brother on Government Tracking/Documentation on this stuff.