On Wednesday, Chicago pharmacist Tangtang Zhao was arrested for selling 125 authentic COVID-19 vaccine cards to anti-vaxxers who either wanted to enter public spaces without getting a shot themselves or then resold the cards to others.
Zhao walked away with $1,277.43 total from 12 different buyers, Ars Technica reports. It's a number so low that it's hard not to wonder what in the world he was thinking. If you're going to undermine public health and put an unknowable number of people at risk of catching a deadly disease by helping anti-vaxxers go undercover as responsible citizens, why not at least....ask for more money to help rationalize your decision? At that rate, Zhao may as well have been giving the CDC vaccine cards away to any chud who wanted one.
It's possible, of course, that the prices were so low because so many people are just printing out their own fake cards at home, anyway. According to Ars Technica, mountains of forgeries are seized by law enforcement on a regular basis, often because they contain typos or other obvious defects that Zhao's stockpile lacked.
But still, if so many anti-vaxxers are already forging their own vaccination records, why sell them at all? Pharmacists make decent money, and $10 vaccine cards can't represent a huge fraction of that. It's all frustrating, defies logic, and, indignation aside, risks setting the world's attempts to bring the pandemic under control even farther back than it's already slid.
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READ MORE: Pharmacist arrested for selling CDC COVID vaccine cards to unvaccinated, feds say [Ars Technica]
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