{"id":93218,"date":"2021-02-28T06:51:53","date_gmt":"2021-02-28T11:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/?p=93218"},"modified":"2021-02-28T06:51:53","modified_gmt":"2021-02-28T11:51:53","slug":"experts-warn-crime-gangs-capable-of-selling-fake-vaccines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2021\/02\/28\/experts-warn-crime-gangs-capable-of-selling-fake-vaccines\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts Warn Crime Gangs Capable of Selling Fake Vaccines"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"VOA \u2014 JOHANNESBURG – International crime fighting agencies say organized crime groups have all the networks and methods needed to smuggle falsified, substandard and stolen COVID-19 vaccines across Africa. \u00a0
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\nInterpol crime intelligence analyst John-Patrick Broome said, as is the case in the rest of the continent, criminal gangs in East Africa import fake medicines from Asia, mostly China and India. The fake drugs often lack any active ingredients and many actually have harmful substances, he said. \u00a0
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\n\u201cIllicit medications are primarily entering the market in eastern Africa through \u2026 avoidance of regulations, there\u2019s violence-based criminality and there\u2019s corruption as well, and corruption which is at a number of different levels,\u201d Broome said. \u00a0
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\nChina and India are expected to produce much of Africa\u2019s vaccine supply. \u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s already a \u201cbig red flag,\u201d says Nigerian journalist Ruona Meyer, whose work has exposed government officials and pharmaceutical company executives working with criminals to distribute falsified medicines in West Africa. Both countries are known as sources for faked pharmaceuticals. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Meyer says there won\u2019t be enough vaccines, and as infection rates and deaths spike in some countries, criminals will introduce fakes into supply chains. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"FILE<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
FILE – A chemist displays hydroxychloroquine tablets in New Delhi, India, April 9, 2020.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She points out they did that easily with chloroquine, when demand for the anti-malarial drug skyrocketed last year after it was touted as a coronavirus treatment. \u00a0
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\n\u201cSo, you had people who started producing fakes. You had people who started breaking down these routes. You had cases where these things were hijacked at ports. Again, they want to break that supply chain,\u201d Meyer said. \u00a0
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\nAuthorities throughout West and Central Africa seized large quantities of fake and substandard chloroquine. Police in Cameroon shut down several pharmaceutical manufacturers producing fake chloroquine. \u00a0
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\n\u201cThe infrastructure alone is mind-boggling, to be able to do all these things. Nobody does all these things if there is no demand,\u201d she said. \u00a0
\nOne sign of the corruption sometimes found in medicine distribution is the 2015 conviction of two Dutch former United Nations consultants for rigging a contract for life-saving drugs in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A court in Britain found Guido Bakker and Siibrandus Scheffer guilty of accepting a bribe of more than $900,000 to steer a contract to a Danish pharmaceutical company. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Lawyers Marius Schneider and Nora Ho Tu Nam represent some of the world\u2019s biggest pharmaceutical companies when their products are faked in Africa. \u00a0
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\"An<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
FILE – An agent stands next to a container full of illegal and fake drugs seized by Ivorian authorities in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Nov. 6, 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ho Tu Nam said criminal organizations have been waiting eagerly for immunization programs to start, and for vaccine shortages. \u00a0\u00a0
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\n\u201cNow people are aware that the vaccine exists; people know it\u2019s being rolled out in certain countries, and I think it\u2019s a perfect time for those syndicates to come in and say, \u2018We have the vaccine; you\u2019re not getting it in the hospitals, you\u2019re not getting it in your private clinics, so come to us.\u2019\u201d she said. \u00a0
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\nAnd they have been successful in the past. Schneider says groups dealing in black market vaccines do their best to make their products look legitimate. \u00a0
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\n\u201cWe have seen instances where NGOs \u2026 have been engaged in the distribution of these vaccines. These NGOs had as a mission to distribute real vaccines to the people. Employees on the ground in African countries were implicated in vaccine traffic,\u201d Schneider said. \u00a0
\nInvestigators say often such cases are settled out of court, in confidential settlements. But in one known case, employees of a multi-national pharmaceutical company were caught helping a criminal network distribute fake vaccines in Africa. \u00a0
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\nMark Micallef of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime says North Africa could be a major entry point for falsified and substandard vaccines. \u00a0
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\nHe said \u201cuncontrolled\u201d trafficking of fake medicines, such as the pain reliever tramadol, has been happening across the vast region for decades. \u00a0
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\n\u201cFake vaccines \u2014 I think there\u2019s a big danger of that in the Maghreb itself, so unregulated territories in Libya, definitely. But, also in Tunisia and maybe border areas of Egypt, less so in Algeria, perhaps, but especially in the northern Sahel,\u201d Micallef warned. \u00a0
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\nCriminals dealing in fake medicines exploit gaps in health services and this will be especially true of COVID-19 shots, and that, Micallef said, will make the crime very difficult to control in North Africa. \u00a0
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\n\u201cThis form of trafficking is tapping an actual health sector need. And the fear is that in the case of the vaccines, a similar scenario might unfold where there are shortages, especially in the border areas, that are preyed upon by criminal enterprise trying to fill that gap,\u201d he said. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VOA \u2014 JOHANNESBURG – International crime fighting agencies say organized crime groups have all the networks and methods needed to smuggle falsified, substandard and stolen COVID-19 vaccines across Africa. \u00a0 \u00a0 Interpol crime intelligence analyst John-Patrick Broome said, as is the case in the rest of the continent, criminal gangs in East Africa import fake […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":93219,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recposts"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93218"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93221,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93218\/revisions\/93221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}