Man in Italy uses fake arm to try to get COVID vaccine certificate without vaccination

Rome: A week after Italy announced new measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, including barring the unvaccinated from social, cultural and sporting activities, a bizarre incident came to light of a middle-aged man trying to acquire a vaccination certificate by turning up at a centre with a fake arm.

The man, who seemed to follow the anti-vaccination campaign, tried to dodge getting the shot by, believe it or not, spending hundreds of euros on a silicone prosthetic. He had hoped the silicone mould covering his real arm would go unnoticed.

However, he failed to fool health professionals in Biella, a town close to Turin in the northern Piedmont region, and was reported to the police for fraud.

The nurse who was administering the vaccines was quick to realise something was wrong. Filippa Bua told local media that when she rolled up his sleeve, she found the skin “rubbery and cold” and the pigment “too light”. She told La Stampa she could not see the man’s veins. “At first I thought I made a mistake, that it was a patient with an artificial arm,” she said.

According to La Repubblica, the man who tried to pull off the crazy stunt was a dentist, who had been suspended from work for refusing to get vaccinated. He reportedly even tried to coax the nurse to turn a blind eye.

“I felt offended as a professional,” the nurse said when she recounted the incident.

“The case borders on the ridiculous, if it were not for the fact we are talking about a gesture of enormous gravity,” the leader of the Piedmont regional government, Albert Cirio, said in a statement on Facebook. As translated by Local.IT, he said the man’s actions were “unacceptable faced with the sacrifice that our entire community has paid during the pandemic, in terms of human lives, the social and economic cost.”

The incident came to light a month after a doctor in Ravenna was arrested for issuing fake vaccination certificates to patients who refused the vaccine.

Stricter health pass rules came into effect earlier this week in the country that suffered serious loss to the pandemic.