They alerted about criminal gangs that illegally commercialize supposed vaccines against Covid-19.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) warnings about the growth of the business of fake vaccines against coronavirus have increased in recent weeks, at a time when the shortage of inoculants affects the progress of immunization campaigns in many countries.
“Some health ministries and regulatory authorities have received suspicious offers of vaccines, and we have also detected that some doses are reintroduced into the distribution chain without maintaining adequate cold storage,” he recently alerted at a press conference. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
According to the Ethiopian official, Criminal gangs illegally commercialize supposed vaccines against Covid-19 – mostly adulterated, fake or refilled doses – in the so-called Deep Internet, the area of the web that is not accessed with traditional search engines.
“Any vaccine purchased outside of government health networks could be substandard or adulterated, and has the potential to cause serious harm,” warned Tedros, who also urged countries to increase the alert and report any suspicious sale of vaccines.
“Any vaccine purchased outside of government health networks could be substandard or adulterated, and has the potential to cause serious harm,” ”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
A recommendation similar to the one reiterated numerous times by Interpol, which at the end of December issued an orange global notice in which it considered this business as a “serious and imminent threat to public safety”, calling the vaccines “liquid gold”.
“The networks behind these crimes have global ambitions. No country or region can fight this type of crime alone. Interpol is helping law enforcement agencies around the world both to identify criminal networks and to dismantle them“said the organization’s secretary general, Jrgen Stock.
Adulterated vaccine seizures
Operations against the fake vaccine business have multiplied in recent months.
Last March, Mexican customs and military authorities discovered within a private plane a shipment of almost 6,000 false doses of the Russian inoculant Sputnik V bound for Honduras at the international airport of Campeche, in the south of the country.
Similar seizures were also carried out in other Mexican states such as Nuevo Len and Sonora.
While, in South Africa, Some 2,400 fake doses were seized from a warehouse in the Johannesburg suburbs, where they also seized a shipment of fake FPP2-type chinstraps from the US brand 3M. Three Chinese citizens and one from Zambia were arrested in the operation.
A fake vaccine sales network of coronavirus was also dismantled in February by the police in China, which arrested 80 suspects and seized more than 3,000 vaccines in a clandestine factory.
“Although we welcome this result, it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to crimes related to the Covid-19 vaccine,” said Stock then, who recalled that the sale of vaccines on the Internet is not approved. .
Interpol ensures that complaints about this illegal business -whose earnings do not fall below six digits- sThey are becoming more and more frequent, as criminal gangs try to defraud health and geriatric organizations.
In Czech Republic, the Government repeatedly denounced having received offers to purchase AstraZeneca vaccines through alleged sellers from Dubai and the Arab Emirates, while the Italian kingdom of Veneto received offers to purchase 27 million doses from anonymous intermediaries, which triggered the alarms of the central government.
According to figures from the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), the different scams or false offers represented at the beginning of April about 1 billion doses of fake vaccines for a total price of almost 14,000 million euros.
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