Home Health & Hospice Week

Feds crack down on counterfeiters.

As hospital systems and others across the country announce vaccination mandates for employees, the stories of forged vaccination cards are on the rise.

Fraudsters are selling fake cards on a variety of social media sites and “the dark web,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “While we do not have definitive numbers, we are seeing more of these types of schemes recently,” a Justice Department spokesperson told the Journal.

What’s to keep bad-apple healthcare providers from issuing counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards to the vaccine-hesitant? Hopefully the feds.

Case in point: Authorities recently arrested California-licensed homeopathic doctor Juli A. Mazi for her alleged scheme to sell homeoprophylaxis immunization pellets and to falsify COVID-19 vaccination cards by making it appear that customers had received the FDA-authorized Moderna vaccine, the Department of Justice says in a release.

“The defendant allegedly created counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards and instructed her customers to falsely mark that they had received a vaccine, allowing them to circumvent efforts to contain the spread of the disease,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco says in a release.

Mazi told patients that the pellets contained the COVID-19 virus and would create an antibody response in the immune system, according to the feds. Mazi provided customers with specific Moderna vaccine lot numbers to enter onto the cards and with instruction on how to select the purported dates on which they had received the Moderna vaccines to evade suspicion, prosecutors say.

“Working closely with our law enforcement partners, our agency will continue to investigate such fraudsters who recklessly endanger the public’s health during the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis,” HHS Office of Inspector General Special Agent in Charge Steven J. Ryan says in the release.