Officials Seize Large Cache of Fake COVID Vaccines, Drugs, Test Kits in Varanasi
New Delhi: In a raid conducted on February 2, the Uttar Pradesh Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has secured a large tranche of spurious COVID-19 vaccines, drugs and rapid antigen test kits from Varanasi.
The accused were five individuals in Varanasi and nine in Delhi, working together.
Uttar Pradesh’s assembly elections are set to begin in a week.
According to a note sent by the state FDA to the Drug Controller General of India, and which The Wire Science has seen, the total seizure is worth Rs 4 crore.
“Huge quantity of illegal and spurious Covid-19 vaccine(s), Covid-19 rapid test kits, unlabelled vials of Covishield vaccine, remdesivir injection and other material to carry out the manufacturing, labelling and packaging of the vaccines” has been recovered, according to the communique.
Officials also seized as many as 10,800 kits of ‘Standard Q Covid-19 Ag SD BIOSENSOR Rapid Test Kits’. In normal course, the kits are manufactured by SD Biosensor Healthcare Pvt. Ltd., a Gurugram-based company. The seized materials had fake batch numbers and fake expiry dates.
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