Black marketing of Remdesivir in B’luru: Five arrested

Bengaluru: In two separate incidents, the city police arrested five persons for selling Remdesivir injections at eight to 10 times more than the prescribed rates of the antiviral drug, the police said on Saturday.

Bengaluru North division police arrested these five persons in two separate incidents. In the first case, four persons were arrested from the Mahalakshmi Layout police limits, while another person was arrested from the Sriramapura police limits.

The police identified the accused persons as Shivakumar, 32, a bank manager in the cooperative sector; Darshan, 29, a medical representative; Girish, 30, a lab technician, and Nagesh, 43, a vegetable vendor.

The fifth arrested person has been identified as Nayaz Ahmed, 30, an employee with an online pharma delivery company.

The police said that all these accused persons were selling the drug for as high as Rs 35,000 to Rs 40,000 per vial.

The accused bank manger used the gullible vegetable vendor to sell these vials by making the purchasers believe that he was in possession of them as one of his relatives died of Covid recently and the family was in possession of these medicines and all he wanted was to sell them at a price at which he had reportedly purchased them.

“The lab technician working in a hospital used to send customers to him,” the police said.

In the Srirampuram case, the medicine delivery boy had purchased vials MRP from a commissioning agent stating that he wanted the medicine to treat his brother.

In Karnataka, the price of Remdesivir ranges between Rs 899 and Rs 5,400 per vial. According to the available statistics, the retail price (MRP) for per vial for various brands of Remdesivir is Rs 5,400 for Hetero company, Rs 4,700 for Mylan, Rs 4,700 for Jubliant, Rs 5,400 for Reddy’s, Rs 4,000 for Cipla and Rs 899 for Zydus.