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Police in Italy have arrested a nurse on charges that he faked giving coronavirus vaccinations to at least 45 people so they could fraudulently obtain a health pass.
The nurse is accused of ditching vaccines in a bin and even putting bandages on his “patients” so no one would suspect the scam.
Police in Ancona, on Italy’s eastern coast, placed four other people under house arrest, accusing them of finding anti-vaccine customers who were willing to pay for a health pass rather than get the shots.
Forty-five people who allegedly received the passes as part of the scam are under investigation. They are required to check in daily with police and prevented from leaving their cities.
Police filmed the nurse working at the huge vaccine centre in Ancona, apparently squirting the needle’s contents into the medical waste bin before pretending to inject the patients' arms, then putting on Band-Aids.
The suspects are accused of corruption, falsifying information and embezzlement, although police said the fake vaccination scheme also wasted a “fundamental public resource.”
Italy has cracked down increasingly hard on the unvaccinated, requiring proof of inoculation or recent recovery from Covid-19 to enter a host of leisure venues and services such as public transport.
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Italy, where the outbreak first erupted in Europe in February 2020, has inoculated 86 per cent of its population aged over 12 and has administered boosters to about 60 per cent of those eligible.
There have been several cases of police investigations into fake health passes, and one headline-grabbing case of a dentist who went into get his injection with a silicone fake arm.
After his stunt landed him under criminal investigation, the dentist announced he had been vaccinated and was merely protesting against the government’s vaccine mandates for healthcare workers.
