The latest ‘Medical Product Quality Report – COVID-19 Issues’ from Medicine Quality Research Group, Centre of Tropical Medicine & Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine and the University of Oxford from December 2020 highlights the rise of substandard and falsified medicines linked to COVID-19.
Throughout 2020 the MQM Globe database tracked and identified over 469 relevant articles from English sources reporting incidents linked to COVID-19 medical products. Those articles included at least 534 different incidents in 60 different countries. Over 50% of the incidents were linked to substandard and falsified (SF) personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitisers. The other incidents included medicines, diagnostics and vaccines, offered also on the dark web.