Pharmacy Owner Arrested For Selling Remdesivir At Higher Price Than MRP

A pharmacist from Maharashtra state in India was arrested for the fraudulent sale of coronavirus drug at a monetary value higher than the maximum retail price.

The pharmacist, Vijay Hake, was trapped on Wednesday, following a complaint. He was caught in the act while selling a vial Remdesivir for Rs 6,000 ($80) rather than the actual price of Rs 4,800 ($65), administrative officer Sanjay Kudetkar told Hindustan Times.

The Prabhani district administration, one of the eight districts in Maharashtra, was alerted about the fraudster by the administrative officer Kudetkar. They received a call after which a trap was set for the owner of the pharmacy. A complaint has been filed against the offender, who has been held in custody until April 15, according to a police official.

According to the deputy collector, officials from the district administration and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also tracked down a similar incident at another medical store in Parbhani's Shivaji Nagar neighborhood, where they discovered that some vials of the drug had been sold without receipts.

In a related case of fallacious sale of drugs amidst the peak of the pandemic, a man from Mumbai was arrested. The Mumbai Police Crime Branch arrested a man for selling 12 injections of Remdesivir in the black market. More Remdesivir injections could be recovered from the man, according to the Crime Branch. At a time when the country is battling with a growing number of coronavirus cases, there have been multiple opportunists trying to make themselves a cut by selling drugs at exorbitant rates.

The police had also arrested four people in Telangana for hiking the rates of the Covid-19 drugs and selling them to vulnerable buyers when the beginning of the pandemic in India had raised a panic. They sold the much sought-after drug Remdesivir, also known as Covifor for Rs 30,000 ($402) when it was priced at only Rs 4,000 ($54). The four were also in possession of Falvipiravir, the Indian manufactured FabiFlu tablets to fight the virus, and sold them at a price hike of nearly 40 percent.

Due to a surge in Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra, Remdesivir injections are in high demand, and people are struggling to get their dose due to a shortage. The Maharashtra Health Minister Rajesh Tope told The News Minute, “I'm not saying that the Union government is not giving us vaccines, the speed of delivery of vaccines is slow.” The health minister had held a meeting on Thursday to discuss ways to combat the sale of medicines in the black market.

The number of Covid cases in Maharasthra has increased to 3,229,547, an increase of 56,286 in a single day. It is likely that the number of cases will cross the 1.1 million mark by April 30 if no stringent measures are taken to curb the surge.

The principal secretary of the state, Pradeep Vyas said: “We are recording more cases than we predicted. The state has already recorded 50% more active cases during this wave, in comparison to the previous wave in September 2020. If cases increase in this proportion, by April 17 we will have around 568,000 active cases.”