NBC NEWS – Specific directions showing how to forge Covid-19 vaccination cards have proliferated on conspiracy, pro-Trump and anti-vaccination forums throughout the internet in recent weeks, as users have exploited a largely makeshift verification system.
The cards, distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have been handed out to the more than 140 million Americans who have already received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccination.
The Biden administration has declared it wouldn’t create a federal vaccination database, citing privacy concerns, paving the way for the cards to become the country’s default national way to verify if someone has been vaccinated.
And while one state — New York — has embraced a vaccination verification app, there is scant evidence that others are close behind.
While much of the country is in the early stages of deciding how to ask employees, students and travelers to prove they’ve been vaccinated, most of those entities that have already established a plan rely on those cards.
The Silicon Valley company Salesforce announced earlier this month that employees returning to work in person will need to show their cards, and United Airlines said it will require the same of its employees.
Seven universities that already have plans in place to ask students to be vaccinated before attending this fall.
American University, Bowdoin College, the University of Colorado Boulder, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Fort Lewis College, Rutgers University and Wesleyan University all said the verification process would consist of asking students to upload their CDC cards, at least if they’re coming from out of state.
But since the cards are marked by hand, don’t contain much information, are printed on easily obtainable heavy white paper and are impossible to quickly verify, it leaves an opportunity for the anti-vaccine community to beat the system by sharing directions on how to forge them.
“It’s a cardboard paper card,” said Alyssa Miller, a cybersecurity expert who specializes in protecting large organizations. “There’s absolutely nothing about it that would prevent you from reproducing it” … Click here to read more.
