Trust societal parasites to see opportunities even in the face of human misery, death and destruction. These elements need to be weeded out from the society with the same urgency of a virus in the body. Fortunately, Delhi Police feels the same about black marketers and hoarders that any industry battling shortage attracts on a temporary basis. It's Remdesivir at the moment.
Where do the hoarders source Remdesivir from?
Where the nation itself and families of those affected have been doing the proverbial pillar to post rounds for Remdesivir, then how and from where do the black marketers manage to get hold of and hoard onto them? "We've found out that it's the hospital staff itself like doctors, nurses, or ward-boys that is behind a lot many of the medicines entering the unorganised channels and being sold for as high as Rs 20,000 to Rs 25000," SN Srivastava, Delhi Police Commissioner, told TezTV in an interview.
Delhi Police knew about it right from the beginning
He also said that, till date, 26 cases have been registered for all sorts of black marketing and hoarding of oxygen cylinders and other Covid medicines. "There's also been one case where an ambulance was being misused to transport oxygen cylinders to illegitimate channels. More than 50 people have been arrested in the matter and more arrests will be made soon."
The worst examples of human kind
The public anger and frustration being redirected at the culprits is obvious. As if the wrath of nature wasn't enough to wreak havoc. Shouldn't they be charged with offences under National Security Act and several other stringent laws? Adds Srivastava, "I'd like to inform you that Delhi Police has been working on this proactively right from the start. The moment the shortage of certain supplies was felt, we started collecting intelligence right away. We had an idea that negative elements in the society will see an opportunity in this situation and they'll hoard and sell medicines at high rates. More such cases will be registered in future apart from the 26 cases already registered." He also said that investigative officers have been told to examine if they can also charge the offenders with culpable homicide, wherever possible.
Fake Remdesivir adds to the crisis
The worst bit is not the fact that some people are even selling jewellery to buy Remdesivir in the black market. The unfortunate part is that the very medicine they hold onto with hope, could in fact, be endangering the life of the patient with a solid chance of it being fake. "We arrested five people in one case and found out that in a laboratory at Haridwar in Uttarakhand, they were making fake Remdesivir. 126 fake Remdesivir injections were ready to sell, with more than 3000 packed materials lying which were soon going to be filled in." He adds, "Later we also found out that these people had already sold more than 2000 fake ones in the market. They were not only sold at very high rates, but they also harmed the patients in the process."
How to spot fake Remdesivir?
Fake Remdesivir packages won't have "Rx" written just before the name of the injection.
The genuine package reads as "100 mg/Vial" but the fake one has "100 mg/vial" written on it. A capitalisation error is common in fake packages.
There is alignment error in the brand name of the product. One can easily notice the gap on the package of fake and genuine Remdesivir injections. The fake vial has slightly increased gap.
Another capitalisation error can be found below the brand name in "Vial/vial" on the fake package
At the bottom of the front side of the fake Remdesivir package. "For use in" written on the genuine package is "for use in" on the fake drug package. Another capitalisation error.
On the back of the box, the "Warning" label is in red on the genuine package. The fake one has a black warning label.
Key information "Covifir [brand name] is manufactured under the licence from Gilead Sciences, Inc" is missing on the fake injection package just below the warning label.
There is another capitalisation error in the text identifying the drug-maker, Hetero Labs. The fake Remdesivir package reads India as "india" with the lower-case letter.
Finally, the spelling of Telangana is wrong and printed as "Telagana" in the fake Remdesivir injection.
