Day 853: Vaxx For Thee But Not For Me

The latest celebrity charged in a Spanish counterfeit vaccine passport scheme is also the most ironic: José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, president of one of the largest pharmceutical companies in Spain. According to Steve Kirsch and the EuroWeekly News, it was a sliding fee scale, so he paid a lot not to take his medicine.

Not surprisingly, some famous athletes also paid the big bucks not to have to take the cure for soccer COVID. What was surprising is that the counterfeiting ring was broken not by a direct investigation, but as a side-effect of the campaign against the "dark web":

What is interesting is that the police did not uncover the scam through a local investigation, but rather through efforts to curb extremism on the dark web.

Enter policeman A, his name has not been made public. According to the Guardia Civil he made contact with an extremist Islamic group who he arranged to meet in France, but told them that he personally could not travel as he had not been vaccinated.

He said: “I don’t have a COVID-19 passport; I am not vaccinated. Allah does not allow me to put anything impure in my body.”

They replied that they could get him a passport and even get him registered on the National Registry of Vaccination, He was introduced to two Madrid residents, Álex, a former thief with a history of sexual assault and known to have contact with criminals in Madrid and Irene, an attractive woman who had been convicted and then pardoned for drug trafficking many years ago.

The police followed the two and noticed that Irene met a young man twice a week, after hours. That young man turned out to be Mario, a nursing assistant in the Hospital of La Paz.

An investigation online found that Mario was an active militant and a Covid-19 denier, which made them suspicious. But on checking they found he could not be the source of the false certificates as he would not have access to the database.

So they went about pretending to be potential customers to gather the evidence they needed. What they found was another nurse was being given a share to issue the certificates, with the money being put into cryptocurrency accounts to try and hide it.

But they also did spend it drawing further attention to themselves, with the network growing and the number of customers increasing.

In the end, the police arrested 15 people involved in the selling and issuing of false certificates.

What makes this case even more bizarre is that Mario contracted Covid-19 and need to be vaccinated to be able to return to work, but he couldn’t do that as a denier. So that’s when he approached his would be accomplice, who helped him out. It was at that point, Mario realised that they could make money offering the false certificates.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.