Curiously, they don't mention why the man has received 217 Covid vaccines, except for "private reasons".
What are you trying to say?
(1) He wasn't actually trying to selling vaccine cards?
(2) He was trying to selling vaccine cards but hadn't yet succeeded?
Given the evidence — the confiscated cards and the sheer number of shots already administered — both (1) and (2) seem like absurd presuppositions.
We're not a jury, and this is not a trial. We can't send him to jail, but we can say he's clearly guilty as hell.
Big mistake and with respect you're uninformed and wrong here.
If he's not convicted then your statement is an accusation of guilt. A false accusation is defamation and it's damaging to the aggrieved party.
False accusations are both harmful to the target and risky for the person making them.
You don't need to be a jury or judge to care about this, for these reasons the AP style guide and practically every journalism outlet takes this matter very seriously.
Now maybe it's 2024, you're a rando from the other side of the world on the Internet and you just do what a billion other social media randos do and you run your mouth. You think your speech doesn't really matter because in practice if you're wrong neither of you is likely to be affected, so you don't need to hold yourself to this standard.
OK fair enough. But if your speech is junk that doesn't matter, why did you open your mouth in the first place? Do us all a favor and if you're going to promote the idea that casual defamation is fine, keep it shut.
News organizations generally try to split their coverage into fact and opinion sections. It would be inappropriate to insert opinion into a factual article, but they can and frequently do weigh in on legal matters in opinion sections. The bar for defamation there is usually actual malice, so in reality it's extremely hard to prevail in suing a news organization for defamation.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
> Evidence for 130 vaccinations in a 9 month period was collected by the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, Germany, who opened an investigation of this case with the allegation of fraud, but criminal charges were not filed.
Given the amount of information they gathered about him, it seems likely that if he was doing something illegal, they would have worked it out and charged him, I guess? It seems like an odd thing to do for “personal reasons” as they say in the paper. But the pandemic was a weird event for everybody, maybe it induced odd behavior or something like that. It is hard to say.
I would tend to assume that the person’s motivation is less interesting to the researchers, and getting into it could distract from the research. Plus, who knows, maybe Germany just has really strict ethical and personal medical laws, so the researchers could just want to avoid that whole minefield.
They wont just keep stamping the same card endlessly until it is completely covered. How else is he going to accomplish this absurd undertaking but to have access to a bunch of official vaccination documents?
It's not outside the realm of possibility that he was also selling them, but I feel like Occam and Hanlon both agree that unless there is direct evidence, he's probably not some criminal mastermind getting rich. He's just a random person with either a fetish or something to prove.
From the AP story: "German police have conducted many raids in connection with forgery of vaccination passports in recent months."
This wasn't just an isolated case or idle speculation. People were selling them, regardless of whether this particular individual did.
> he's probably not some criminal mastermind getting rich
Of course not. He was a dumb petty criminal who got caught, just like countless other dumb petty criminals in the world.
I think you underestimate the power of neuroses. Good chance no money was involved.
Neurosis was my initial theory, before I discovered the news articles mentioned in the submission. "They learned of his case via newspaper reports."
> Here, we report on a 62-year-old male hypervaccinated individual from Magdeburg, Germany (HIM), who deliberately and for private reasons received 217 vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 within a period of 29 months (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1). HIM's hypervaccination occurred outside of a clinical study context and against national vaccination recommendations. Evidence for 130 vaccinations in a 9 month period was collected by the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, Germany, who opened an investigation of this case with the allegation of fraud, but criminal charges were not filed. 108 vaccinations are individually recorded and partly overlap with the total of 130 prosecutor-confirmed vaccinations (appendix 2 p 12). To investigate the immunological consequences of hypervaccination in this unique situation, we submitted an analysis proposal to HIM via the public prosecutor. HIM then actively and voluntarily consented to provide medical information and donate blood and saliva. This procedure was approved by the local Ethics Committee of the University Hospital of Erlangen, Germany. Throughout the entire hypervaccination schedule HIM did not report any vaccination-related side effects. From November 2019, to October 2023, 62 routine clinical chemistry parameters showed no abnormalities attributable to hypervaccination (appendix 1 tab 2). Furthermore, HIM had no signs of a past SARS-CoV-2 infection, as indicated by repeatedly negative SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests, PCRs and nucleocapsid serology (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Without being crass, I can definitely see a world in which someone showing up to do something they know they’re not meant to do, interacting with a nurse (likely female, likely in a uniform), and getting a small but manageable amount of pain being a fetish thing.
[ Edit: Wow, I didn't even think of the fraud possibility mentioned in other comments. :-( :-( In some places maybe people are also directly paid to receive vaccines? ]
I wonder if there's anyone for whom 217 total lifetime vaccine doses (cumulative across various vaccines) would be considered medically indicated. Maybe if you got childhood vaccines on an inefficient schedule, moved around between countries with different recommendations, got a bunch of travel or special occupational hazard or special exposure risk immunizations, eventually got multi-dose old age vaccine series, and also got the annual flu shot every year?
Oh, I guess if you go to both the northern and the southern hemisphere every year, you could have two different annual flu shots indicated (since the hemispheres have different flu shot formulations). I think that could do it when combined with the other stuff.