The police in Palermo, Italy, announced on Saturday (15) the arrest of a nurse due to the application of false doses of immunization against Covid in activists against vaccination – they sought to obtain the receipt without actually having received the drug.
According to a post on Twitter, the security force said that the author of “fictitious vaccinations” will be investigated for misrepresentation and embezzlement, that is, subtraction or embezzlement of money or public good. In a video that accompanies the message, the nurse is caught by a security camera pouring the dose of immunization into a tissue before performing the application on a person.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, this is a 58-year-old woman who worked at an immunization center in the capital of Sicily. As with anti-vaccinations, police say the nurse also falsified the booster dose she would have received. This is not the first time such an episode has taken place in Italy. In December, also in Sicily, three people, including a nurse and the leader of a local movement against immunizations, were arrested and charged with corruption and counterfeiting.
At the time, dozens of vaccination certificates were obtained this way, even by a police officer. Italian media reported at that time that interested parties would pay 400 euros (about R$2,500, at Monday’s quotation) for the service.
Also in December, an Italian was denounced after using a silicone arm to try to trick a nurse into getting vaccinated against Covid. He, who was also trying to get an immunization certificate without taking the dose, worked in the health field and had been suspended from work for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid. Vaccination is mandatory for all healthcare professionals in Italy.
To try to contain the spread of Covid and reduce the pressure on the country’s health system, the Italian government has determined the mandatory vaccination of all people over 50 years old and for the use of public transport. The measure, valid until June 15, makes the presentation of a test with a negative result and the use of a mask not enough to walk on buses and subways.
So far, according to data from the New York Times, 82% of the Italian population has already received a dose of the Covid vaccine, and 75% are fully immunized — 44% have also received the booster dose. The moving average of cases in the country, according to the Our World in Data platform, linked to Oxford University, is on an upward trend, with about 3,000 infections per 1 million inhabitants.
For comparison, the United States has 2,426 contaminations in the same index, and Brazil, 322, but experts say that the numbers are underreported due to the difficulty in accessing Covid detection tests and the blackout of data that has occurred in the country since the Ministry of Health’s systems were brought down by hacker attacks in December.
A Datafolha survey published on Saturday (15) showed that one in four Brazilians aged 16 or over says they have been diagnosed with Covid since the beginning of the pandemic. There are 42 million people infected, almost double the total number of cases officially registered in the country.
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