[Siddharth Chandrashekhar, a lawyer who has filed a public interest lawsuit in Mumbai’s high court, described the scenario as “heartbreaking.” The court said it was “really shocking that incidents of fake vaccination are on the rise.”]
The police have arrested 14 people
on suspicion of involvement in a scheme that administered injections of salt
water instead of vaccine doses at nearly a dozen private vaccination sites in
Mumbai over the past two months. The organizers, including medical
professionals, allegedly charged between $10 and $17 per dose, according to the
authorities, who said they had confiscated more than $20,000 from the suspects.
“Those arrested are charged under
criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery,” said Vishal Thakur, a police
officer in Mumbai.
More than 2,600 people came to the
camps to receive shots of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, manufactured and
marketed in India as Covishield. Some said that they became suspicious when
their shots did not show up in the Indian government’s online portal tracking
vaccinations, and when the hospitals that the organizers had claimed to be
affiliated with did not match the names on the vaccination certificates they
received.
“There are doubts about whether we
were actually given Covishield or was it just glucose or expired/waste
vaccines,” Neha Alshi, who said she was a victim of the scam, wrote on Twitter.
Siddharth Chandrashekhar, a lawyer
who has filed a public interest lawsuit in Mumbai’s high court, described the
scenario as “heartbreaking.” The court said it was “really shocking that incidents
of fake vaccination are on the rise.”
Medical scams are nothing new in
India, where, during the country’s mammoth
outbreak this spring, profiteers targeted vulnerable Covid patients
with fake
drugs and oxygen. The police in West Bengal state are also investigating
whether hundreds of people, including a local lawmaker, received fake vaccines
there.
India has administered more than
340 million vaccine doses, but less than 5 percent of the population is fully
vaccinated, according to the Our
World in Data project at the University of Oxford. The country is reporting
nearly 50,000 new cases daily and nearly 1,000 Covid deaths, numbers that are
far lower than two months ago, although experts have always believed India’s
official tallies to
be vastly undercounted.
On Saturday, the pharmaceutical
company Bharat Biotech reported that its Covaxin
shot — the other vaccine in wide use in India — was 77.8 percent
effective in preventing symptomatic illness, according to the results of a
late-stage trial. Those results were published online but have not been peer-reviewed.
The report said that the vaccine
prevented severe Covid in 93.4 percent of cases and was also effective against
the Delta variant, preventing infection in 65.2 percent of cases.
There have been lingering doubts
about the vaccine, which was approved by the Indian government in January and
administered to millions before
it had been publicly proved to be safe or effective.
Hari Kumar is a reporter in the New
Delhi bureau. He joined The Times in 1997. @HariNYT
