Moroccan Pharmacists are warning against an online black market that has exploded with offers to sell COVID-19 tests, fleecing hapless people across the country for the quick antigen swabs.
The Rapid antigen testing, able to return results within 15 to 30 minutes was initially authorized for selling in pharmacies by the Minister of Health early July, emerging as a substitute to the time-consuming and pricey PCR tests that are unable to return COVID-19 test results within specified time limits.
“A week later, the National Council of Pharmacists was contacted by the Directorate of Medicines and Pharmacies in order to withdraw antigenic tests from pharmacies without giving any justification,” Mohamed Lahbabi, the president of the Confederation of Moroccan Pharmacists told Hespress English in a phone interview.
He said that shortly after pharmacies were banned from marketing the antigen tests, online retail stores and pages emerged online pushing counterfeit tests, either at wholesale or by unit marketed towards people who might need them to be able to travel or access jobs.
“The black market has become very aggressive. It has reached the extent of jewelry stores, which should only sell jewelry, pushing out Instagram stories with mass quantities of counterfeit antigene tests,’ a source, who was not authorized to speak by her job, told Hespress English.
Hespress English was able to identify six Facebook pages cashing in on testing kits on the internet, addressed to cities like Casablanca and Agadir, at times offering free delivery for prices ranging around MAD 100.
“When pharmacists were licensed to dispense antigenic tests, we started selling at MAD120,” Lahbabi said. Prices in the black market could reach up to MAD400, he added.
He worries over the unregulated and arbitrary sanitary conditions of test consumption and use. “The problem is if someone uses the test and the result is positive; and if this person throws the test somewhere without packaging, then we’ll have a spread of infections.”
His syndicate wants the Drugs and Pharmaceutical Directorate of the Ministry of Health to intervene and relicense pharmacies to retail the antigen tests.
Long before the onset of the pandemic, an illicit economy for medicines had been prospering globally, with a wide range of illegal products traded on the black market.
In early December 2020, Interpol warned its 194 member countries to brace for organized crime groups working in the falsification, theft and illegal advertising of COVID-19 related products.
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