On Dec. 22, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation by state Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and state Sen. Anna M. Kaplan into law that would explicitly make the falsification of COVID-19 vaccination records a crime. The new law takes effect at a critical moment in the state’s battle against coronavirus, as the world deals with a sharp rise in new COVID cases due to the omicron variant, adding new urgency to the effort to ensure every eligible New Yorker is fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
“We need to make sure we learn the lessons of the pandemic so we don’t make the same mistakes twice,” Hochul said. “These new laws will help us improve our response to the pandemic now, crack down on fraudulent use of vaccination records, and help us better understand the areas of improvement we need to make to our health care system so we can be even more prepared down the road.”
Kaplan added, “With the omicron variant putting our community at greater risk and threatening the progress we’ve made recovering from the pandemic,
countless employers, schools, small businesses, and communities are relying on genuine proof of vaccination status as a tool to keep their spaces safe from COVID transmission. It’s never been more urgent that we protect this process from fraud so that the health and safety of the public isn’t compromised by bad actors using fraudulent vaccination cards or passports.
The ‘Truth in Vaccination’ law will serve as a strong deterrent to prevent people from lying about their vaccination status, protecting public health, and ensuring our economic recovery can move forward.”In the months since government and private industry began instituting COVID-19 vaccination mandates, there has been extensive reporting on how fake vaccine card sales have skyrocketed, with numerous high profile examples of professional athletes, high-ranking NYPD officers, FDNY and sanitation workers, and medical facility staff attempting to circumvent public health and safety regulations through use of counterfeit
cards and fake digital passports. Anti-vaxx web forums have also spread tips for how to create fake cards.
As these crimes have proliferated across the country, federal authorities have scrambled to address the growing crisis. “Vaccine requirements work. The data is clear. However, when we have a preponderance of fake vaccine records, that lulls New Yorkers into a false sense of public health safety and undermines the protections that vaccine requirements provide to everyone,” Dinowitz said.
The “Truth in Vaccination Law,” S.4516C/A.7536B, will: Explicitly make it a crime to create a fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination card by amending the legal definition of a «written instrument» to explicitly include a card provided to a person by a vaccine provider indicating the date a person received vaccination
against COVID-19 as well as the type of vaccine and its lot number.
Explicity make it a crime to create a fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination passport by amending the penal law to create a crime of intentionally altering computer material to indicate that a person received a vaccination against COVID-19.
The new law takes effect immediately. (Submitted)
