A 50-year-old man attempted to pass off a silicone arm as his own to get a Covid-19 vaccination shot at a clinic in northern Italy.
Apparently, he wanted to get a vaccine certificate without actually getting inoculated.
Nurse, Filippa Bua, was able to spot the fake arm before administering the vaccine in Biella, Piedmont, on Thursday. She told CNN she noticed something was off about the arm.
“The color of the skin was anomalous, much lighter compared to the hands or the face of the patient,” she said.
“I first felt sorry for the man, thinking that he had a prosthesis and wondering if I had somehow forced him to give me the wrong arm,” Bua said. “But then he admitted he was wearing the fake arm on purpose to avoid getting the vaccine!”
The discovery prompted a range of emotions for the nurse, who said she has been one since 1987 and has administered thousands of jabs.
“At the very beginning I was surprised, then I was angry, I felt professionally offended, he showed no respect for our intelligence and our profession,” she said. “I would never expect such a thing in my life.”
The Piedmont regional government slammed the man’s attempt to beat the system.
“The case could be classified as ‘ridiculous,’ except that we are talking about a gesture of enormous gravity, unacceptable for the sacrifice that the whole community is paying for the pandemic,” a joint communiqué from the Piedmont region’s President and health counselor reads.
The President of the Piedmont regional government, Alberto Cirio, added that the incident was “an offense to the region’s health system, that is among the first in Italy for vaccination capacity and for booster doses.”
