Hundreds injected with fake Covid-19 vaccine in India

Mumbai police say around 2,000 people were injected with a saline solution

Indian police said Friday that around 2,000 people were injected with fake Covid-19 vaccines in Mumbai, and another 500 — some of them disabled — may have suffered the same fate in a second major city.

Vaccination rates rose sharply this week after the Indian government made shots free following a devastating pandemic surge in April and May.

Police in Mumbai said that around 2,000 people who thought they were being vaccinated were in fact injected with a saline solution.

Ten people have been arrested including two doctors at a private hospital in the financial hub, police told a news conference, with the scammers targeting residents of an upscale housing complex in one case.

"We (then) discovered that eight more camps were organised by this syndicate," said Vishwas Patil, joint commissioner for the law and order division.

Police have recovered 1.24 million rupees ($16,700) in cash which was "fraudulently obtained" by the accused.

Police in Kolkata meanwhile have arrested a man posing as a civil servant with a master's degree in genetics who reportedly ran as many as eight spurious vaccination camps.

Police said at least 250 disabled and transgender people were injected at one site, and that in total nearly 500 people may have been given counterfeit jabs across the city.

Kolkata official Atin Ghosh said that the seized vials were falsely labelled as containing the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, branded in India as Covishield.

"It was found that the Covishield label was stuck over another label, that of Amikacin Sulphate 500 mg, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections of the urinary tract, bones, brain, lungs and blood among others," Ghosh told AFP.