Man uses fake arm to get vaccination certificate without getting vaccinated

US seeks to apply more vaccines due to omicron threat 0:49

(CNN) -

A 50-year-old man tried to pass a fake silicone arm at a covid-19 vaccination clinic as his own, in an attempt to obtain a vaccination certificate without actually getting vaccinated.

The man was caught by the nurse as he was about to administer the vaccine in Biella, Piedmont.

Filippa Bua told CNN that she noticed something "abnormal" on the 50-year-old man's arm.

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"The skin color was abnormal, much lighter compared to the patient's hands or face," he said.

After inspecting the area, he realized that the arm was a fake, made of silicone.

"First I felt sorry for the man, I thought he had a prosthesis and I wondered if I had somehow forced him to give me the wrong arm," says Bua.

"But then he admitted that he was using the fake arm on purpose to avoid getting the vaccine!"

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US seeks to apply more vaccines due to omicron threat 0:49

"At first I was surprised, then I got angry, I felt professionally offended, he did not show respect for our intelligence and our profession," said Bua, who has been a nurse since 1987 and has administered thousands of vaccines.

"I would never expect something like this in my life."

The Piedmont regional government condemned the man's attempt to deceive the nurse.

"The case could be described as 'ridiculous', except that we are talking about a gesture of enormous gravity, unacceptable due to the sacrifice that the entire community is paying for the pandemic," read a joint statement from the president of the Piedmont region and health advisor.

In a video message, the president of the Piedmont regional government, Alberto Cirio, went further and said that the incident was "an offense to the health system of the region, which is among the first in Italy for the ability to vaccination and administering booster doses. "

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On November 30, Cirio tweeted the map of the ECDC, the European center for the prevention and control of diseases, in which Piedmont appears among the few areas of Europe marked in green, which means that the contagion is below 1 %.

Arm Covid-19 Vaccination