NEW YORK (AP) — A Marine Corps reservist who was charged in last year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol also schemed with a nurse to steal, forge and sell hundreds of coronavirus vaccination cards and destroy vaccine doses to fake inoculations, federal authorities said Thursday.
Reservist Jia Liu, 26, and nurse Steven Rodriguez, 27, were awaiting a court appearance Thursday on charges of conspiring to commit forgery and to defraud the federal government.
“By deliberately distributing fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination cards to the unvaccinated, the defendants put military and other communities at risk of contracting a virus that has already claimed nearly 1 million lives in this country,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
Liu’s lawyer, Benjamin Yaster, declined to comment. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Rodriguez had an attorney who could speak to the allegations.
According to an indictment, Rodriguez, who worked at a clinic on Long Island, pilfered blank COVID-19 vaccination cards.
He and Liu allegedly offered customers the choice of buying cards blank or fraudulently filled out, with a premium-priced option: a fake vaccination record in New York state and city databases that are used to issue vaccine passes.
A buyer who sprung for the add-on would go to the clinic, where…
