Covid crisis boosts India’s trade in fake medicines

As India is engulfed by a second wave of coronavirus infections, which is swamping big cities, its people have rushed to the black market to buy drugs for treatment. Neighbourhood WhatsApp groups in the capital city of New Delhi buzz with urgent pleas for sellers of everything from oxygen to remdesivir, an antiviral used in India to treat Covid-19.

In Pune, a city in the hard-hit state of Maharashtra, four people were arrested this month for selling fake vials of remdesivir for Rs35,000 ($464), far above the official Rs2,000 ($27) price cap for the genuine product. Police said the men had sold at least seven vials filled with liquid paracetamol to a relative of a coronavirus patient. Further south, in Mysuru, in the state of Karnataka, a nurse at a private hospital was arrested for selling remdesivir vials that had been refilled with antibiotics and saline solution.

“In times like these, where you see high numbers for tocilizumab — an arthritis drug — and remdesivir, this is a ripe area for people to make up this stuff and slap labels on,” says Dinesh Thakur, a former pharma executive who works as a public health activist in the US. An estimated one in 10 medical products in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified, according to the World Health Organization.

https://www.ft.com/content/1bb3c839-d796-46f8-a2cd-519122a5908c