As part of the Medicine Quality Research Group, several members of the Supply and Market Dynamics; Medicine Quality Working Group have contributed to the publication of a new Medical Product Quality Report focusing on increasing issues around substandard and falsified COVID-19 vaccines. With the continued global vaccine rollout, they have worked on listing incidents and problems, accessible in the public domain, with COVID-19 vaccines quality, diversion, thefts, and scams.
COVID-19 vaccination offers protection and will be a critical tool to envision the end of the pandemic. However, failure to provide equitable global access to vaccines is increasing concern about falsified, diverted and substandard vaccines with a growing number of incidents being reported globally.
By the end of 2020 the group had shared 22 reports for 9 countries. By the beginning of March there were 76 reports affecting 28 different countries.
Unauthorized copies of approved COVID-19 vaccines were reported for Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Sinovac, Sinopharm, and Moderna.
The Medicine Quality Research Group is advocating for urgent coordination of interventions to reduce the risk of SF COVID-19 vaccines on global public health, through significant enhancement in global capacity for their prevention, detection, and response.
The vaccine report will be updated regularly and aims to support national medicine regulators, international organizations, vaccine manufacturers and distributors and civil society by summarising the current public domain literature, to help inform action and policy and encourage urgently needed joined-up interventions to reduce the risk of SF COVID-19 vaccines on global public health.
Data included in the report are from scientific literature, public alerts and warnings, and lay press. Most of the lay press information was extracted from IDDO’s MQM Globe, a free-to-use online tool that maps news reports worldwide of SF medical products.
Learn more and download the report
The Medicine Quality Research Group is a part of the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) and the Mahidol Oxford Research Unit (MORU) of the Centre for Tropical Medicine & Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford.