Out of longing for the Apple Store

Created: 08/04/2022, 20:04

By: Stefanie Zipfer

Dachau – It was already a cross last December.

Anything fun was forbidden to the unvaccinated!

In this respect, she was almost forced to either get vaccinated or to get a fake vaccination card.

The young woman would have liked to have had such a vaccination card.

Unfortunately, hers was fake © Sophia Kembowski / dpa

The latter, a 29-year-old woman from Munich explained at the district court on Thursday, was the only acceptable means of choice for her.

Just imagine: as she was not vaccinated, she was no longer able to go to the Apple store, she was no longer allowed to take her child to kindergarten or fetch her there.

"I was ostracized everywhere!"

District judge Tobias Bauer did not want to accept this.

"It's not about whether they were vaccinated or not.

We don't force anyone in Germany to get vaccinated." However, being unvaccinated has "just disadvantages that you have to accept".

And the 29-year-old, who is a trained doctor's assistant, was not willing to live with the consequences of refusal to vaccinate.

Scientifically, Bauer clarified, the refusal to vaccinate was “complete nonsense”.

Especially as a doctor's assistant, the young woman should have known about the "importance of vaccinations, especially for older and sick people".

From a "human point of view", Bauer continued, he could at least "understand" that the 29-year-old was "worried".

The means of expressing this skepticism about vaccination were "completely wrong".

In fact, the young woman has two children aged one and four years.

She breastfed the younger one last December.

In order to still be able to participate in Munich city life, she got a yellow vaccination card with a fake corona vaccination certificate.

With this little yellow book, she finally drove to the In-Center in Dachau on December 23, 2021, to the Ost-Apotheke there.

There she presented her alleged vaccination certificate in order to obtain the coveted digital vaccination certificate for her mobile phone.

From then on, this proof of vaccination as a QR code could have been scanned by restaurant or retail employees and thus give her access to the bars and shops.

The problem: the pharmacy staff, not only in the Dachauer Ost-Apotheke, were already trained in dealing with the wrong vaccination cards at the time.

In this respect, a quick check of the batch number of the vaccine mentioned in the yellow booklet showed that a lot may have happened on November 8, 2021 and December 7, 2021, but certainly not that the 29-year-old had been vaccinated against Corona on these days.

"But I didn't use the passport at all," the young woman wailed - combined with the request that the judge please refrain from punishing this document forgery.

But Bauer remained firm: By trying to get to the digital QR code with the wrong passport, she had "shown massively punishable behavior".

And even if the accused is not the "classic vaccination refuser", he has to punish her for reasons of equal treatment - countless such cases are piling up on the desks of German magistrates.

After all, the punishment was comparatively mild.

Instead of the fine of 1,600 euros demanded by the public prosecutor, the mother of two, whose husband works for the Munich cemetery administration, only has to pay 975 euros.

This means that the 29-year-old's crime will not appear in her police clearance certificate, although Judge Bauer was already convinced that the woman was "not a criminal, she will not commit any further crimes".

An even milder punishment is not possible with the best will in the world.

Because: Nobody had to be vaccinated back then, you could breastfeed until "Santa's never-ending day".

But especially with the delta variant of the corona virus that was prevalent at the time, “one could have expected so much insight from someone who is a doctor’s assistant that infectious diseases are dangerous”.