I chose a random Fox version of the story, but it’s the same information floating around from NBC and ABC and wherever else. Two nurses managed to make $1.5 million not just forging vaccine cards but entering people in the vaccination database in New York. I hope those two women are nailed to the wall, lose their licenses, and IF they genuinely believe they’re doing work, whatever sources of information they’d ingested should be tracked down and charged too – though of course we don’t do that. It may not be legal to yell “fire” in a crowded theatre (unless you can make a reasonable case for believing the theatre to be on fire, totally heard about the fire from a reputable source, were OBVIOUSLY only joking or were executing performance art celebrating the fallibility of people’s interactions with information and the exotic Brownian motions of crowds under the influence of the tide of panic… )
Ahem.
I meant : it may not be legal to yell “fire” in a crowded theatre but we truly need clear laws in place to deal with intentional or willful disinformation, and somewhere in the chain of vaccine and COVID disinformation people are willfully, purposefully spreading false information and assisting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands while prolonging the agony of a pandemic, and perhaps more importantly, imperiling our ability or will to EVER respond to COVID-25 or airborne Ebola or an intentional, weaponized version of something similar…
BUT I digress, because something I’m really angry about this morning is the way each of these cut and paste stories from the New York Times, CNBC, Fox, ABC (I apparently don’t really understand how this works – a lot of different authors, this isn’t an AP News redistributed article, all using the same quotes and facts) absolutely fails to take the next step and ask “what about the [does quick math of $1.5 million divided by a reported cost of $220 per adult] over 6600 people who bought the cards?!”. Are they being tracked down? Are they being charged?
Certainly one of the things I’ve wondered about as more and more anecdotes of breakthrough infections go floating through is wondering – well, how do I REALLY know that everyone at the party is vaccinated? How do I REALLY know all the kids that are coming back to school are vaccinated?
It just continues to undermine my faith in anyone around me, and I hope that, as above, there’s capacity and nails for the 6,600+ people who felt that it was easier to pay someone to give them a card and falsely enter them in a database than it was to get a free shot, or religious exemption, or… you know… to read good information and protect those around them. The number’s probably a LOT higher because it was only $80 for kids [continues napkin math] so assuming this is a parent “saving” their average family of two kids, possibly without getting a second parent involved that’s closer to 12,000 fake cards floating around…
Because I try to be an equal opportunity napkin math jotter, New York State claims an 0.25% breakthrough hospitalization rate [https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-breakthrough-data]. With 14.4 million people fully vaccinated in the state of New York and a maximum of fake cards from these two being around 12,000… they only account for 0.008% of people carrying vaccination cards and probably had no REAL effect on the spread of COVID, and I shouldn’t be nearly as absolutely incensed as I am about all this, but they’re absolutely on the wrong side of the war.