No, Fake Vaccine Cards Are Not an Issue in College
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The Coronavirus Pandemic has stolen two years of our lives that we’ll never get back, and frankly – we’re exhausted. We have lost 600,000 Americans, equivalent to about half the entire population of Hawaii, to the virus and have seen increases in depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even thoughts of suicide according to Kaiser Family Foundation as a result.
Thanks to Operation Warp Speed (the federal effort to accelerate vaccine creation and distribution), the Center for Disease Control and our hard-working healthcare providers, we now have three effective and safe vaccines that have not only slowed the spread of COVID-19, but also lessened symptoms and significantly decreased fatal cases, according to the CDC.
Despite initial hesitancy about the vaccine, ABC News reported that more people are getting vaccinated as a result of the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the Pfizer vaccine. Now, schools and businesses across the nation are requiring proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.
Marist has reached its goal of having 95% of students, faculty and staff fully vaccinated, which is leagues above compared to the vaccination rate of the country at just 51.1% and the state of New York at 58.4% according to USA Today. While Marist’s vaccination rate is high, this is not the case across the nation, leading to the concept of fake vaccination cards.
After getting the COVID-19 vaccine, you receive a vaccination card that records the date, type and dosage of both of your shots. As a result of sustained vaccine resistance when coupled with increased vaccine requirements for jobs and schools, fake vaccination cards were bound to be a problem. Ironically, falsified vaccine cards aren’t the first type of fraudulent identification to worry college administrators.
As many know, fake IDs are common among college students who use them to get into bars and clubs that require you to be 21 years old. The Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility found in 2014 that 66.1% of college students owned a fake ID, so it would make sense for college administrators, teachers, fellow students and parents to express their concern that fake vaccination cards might become a problem on campus. Through my research, I haven’t found a solitary case of this happening.
It is important that I act in good faith when arguing my points so I should also say that nothing is absolute and it is very possible, and I will concede that there have probably been students who have bought a fake vaccine card, tried and succeeded, to upload it to their schools' records.
However, I haven’t yet found a report mentioning a case of a student doing so. Newsweek reported back in the beginning of August students at the University of North Carolina knew a fellow student that had bought a fake vaccine card. Professor Benjamin Mason Meier tweeted on August 2 “Speaking with worried @UNC students over the weekend, every single one of them: knew exactly how to buy a fake #COVID19Vaccine card and knew a fellow student who had submitted one to the University.”
I understand that Meier is keeping these students who had come forward confidential, but he doesn’t say exactly how many students knew these things. Having 10 students know how to get a card or know someone who submitted one is extremely different from knowing 100. Depending on the scale of the situation, it wildly changes whether something is a problem or not.
I made a poll asking people various questions about fake IDs and fake COVID-19 vaccine cards and how much of an issue people think they are in college. When asked if they knew how to get a fake ID, 72.7% of participants responded affirmatively, with 86.4% of respondents knowing someone with a falsified ID. Yet, 60% of students do not believe that fake IDs are an issue on campus. Comparing this with fake vaccine cards, 81.8% of respondents said they do not know how to get a fake vaccine card themselves and 86.4% did not personally know someone with a fake vaccine card. When asked if they believe fake cards are an issue in college, more than half stated that they did not think they were.
To analyze my results in the context of Marist, I also asked what other matters students are concerned about besides falsified documents like vaccine cards and IDs. Almost unanimously, the responses named sexual assault and drugs. As I commute, I can only trust the respondents that these are the main issues they face living on-campus, and although a little less than half of the students believe fake vaccine cards are an issue in college, we also see that over nearly 90% of them don’t know how to get a fake vaccine card.
Alisa Chang of National Public Radio interviewed Associated Press’s Roselyn Romero about fake vaccine cards in colleges. Romero brings up a couple of anecdotes that upon further inspection, we can see hold up no weight. Firstly, she brought up an Instagram account that followed her called “NHS vaccinecards” that was allegedly selling fake vaccine cards to people for $20-$200. I looked up this account and found a couple of accounts with similar names, all only having one or two followers, so it is likely that these accounts are fake, deactivated, or don’t have as much influence as Romero makes it out to be. Secondly, she brings up conversations that she’s had with other students from her college, California Polytechnic University.
All she says is that students are saying they are easy to obtain, but doesn’t mention a particular case of it happening, or if these students know anyone who had received a fake card. Finally, she discusses how Instagram and Snapchat stories only last for 24 hours, so a person could theoretically offer to sell fake vaccine cards and there wouldn’t be any immediate record of it. But again, she doesn’t list a specific example of this happening besides the previously mentioned Instagram account that has possibly been deactivated.
To be as accurate as possible I contacted one of these Instagram accounts on Sep. 9 under the guise of needing to buy a fake vaccine card for school. This account is allegedly selling cards for $100 and is getting lot numbers, the serial numbers of an individual shot, from the CDC, and they also said they have sold two cards to college students.
The most concerning part about this conversation was how they said they can get lot numbers from the CDC, however we also must consider the fact that this could be a scam, and that this person is just collecting money and not returning on their promises. Even if this account was legitimate, they also stated that they only sold two cards to college students. As of Sep. 12, the account has been deactivated.
This is not to say that it isn’t happening at all outside of college either. One of the largest groups of people buying fake vaccination cards is healthcare workers, as their jobs are some of the most threatened right now. NPR reported at the beginning of September, Jasmine Clifford of Lyndhurst, New Jersey was charged with criminal possession of a forged instrument and conspiracy for selling around 250 fake vaccination cards to multiple people including healthcare workers for $200 a piece. She had a partner, Nadayza Barkley, who was able to enter ten people into the New York State vaccine database for an extra $250. This shows that falsified vaccination cards are surely an issue, just not in school. So, if fake vaccines aren’t an issue in school, why is there so much worry college students will get them?
I believe people’s main issue with fake cards is how easy it is to fake them. State IDs and driver’s licenses are plastic – they must be scanned by a store clerk for them to sell alcohol or tobacco products to a customer. Vaccine cards however are made of paper, don’t include a photo of the person and could easily be created in a Google Doc and printed in mass quantities. Now, this might be an issue for bars, clubs and small businesses that won’t have the ability to quickly verify if one’s vaccine card is authentic or not, but for an organization like Marist, this isn’t an issue at all. Students and faculty who got vaccinated through the school had to swipe their ID cards, which automatically uploaded and updated our vaccination status.
If students did not want to get the vaccine, there are fewer troubling ways of getting around it besides buying falsified documents. Marist offers vaccine exemption for both medical and religious reasons. While a medical exemption may be harder to obtain as it requires a note from one’s doctor, realistically, anyone can get a religious exemption. All that is asked of the person is a note from their parents that states why they need an exemption, which practices of their religion specifically describe why they must be exempted and any further supporting documentation. Something like this can easily be falsifiable, it does not cost anything, plus the repercussions for this are less damaging than the alternative which is, according to USA Today, anyone who was caught with fake vaccination cards could receive a fine of $5,000 and possibly up to five years in federal prison.
As I have said before, we are all exhausted from this pandemic. No one wants to wear a mask anymore, no one wants quarantine for two weeks, no one wants to be wary of other people if they hear a cough in a somewhat crowded space. But so far, we have worked together amazingly by getting vaccinated. As we heard before from DiCaprio, about 95% of us are vaccinated and we can be almost sure that they are all legit. I know people worry about college students getting other falsified documents, but we need to have a little bit more faith in ourselves and be proud of how far we have come in the last 18 months.