An Italian man is facing charges of fraud after he turned up at a local vaccination center wearing a prosthetic arm to avoid getting the jab. The unnamed man, from Biella, a town close to Turin in the Piedmont region, is said to have tried to dodge the vaccination but still obtain a health pass, a certificate necessary in Italy to take part in most social, sporting, and cultural activities, The Guardian reports. In fact, he almost got away with the plan, but a perceptive health worker noticed something was amiss and rumbled his plan.
- The man was blatant in his attempts to deceive authorities. The man is said to have completed all bureaucratic formalities including signing consent forms in front of a doctor before sitting down and rolling up the sleeve of his shirt to receive the vaccine. The health worker administering the shot didn’t seem anything was strange at first, but then she noticed something odd.
- The prosthetic arm was convincing, but not that convincing. After looking more closely and touching the arm, the health worker realized something wasn’t right and asked the man to take off his shirt. The man realized he had been found out and allegedly tried to convince the worker to let him get away with it anyway.
- The health worker was incredibly offended. “I felt offended as a professional,” Filippa Bua told La Repubblica. “The color of the arm made me suspicious and so I asked the man to uncover the rest of his left arm. It was well made but it wasn’t the same color.” The man also reportedly said to her: “Would you have imagined that I’d have such a physique?”
- Local authorities have thanked Bua for her perceptiveness. “The promptness and skill of the health worker ruined the plans of this person, who will now have to respond to the judiciary,” Alberto Cirio, the president of Piedmont, said in a joint statement with Luigi Icardi, the regional health councilor. The men went on to say that the situation would “border on ridiculous” were it not “for the fact that we are talking about a gesture of enormous gravity.”
