Little vials, big crime: Covid-19 and organised crime
Covid vaccines are among the hottest commodities in the world, as manufacturers can’t produce enough jabs for everyone. The Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism investigates what this means for the vaccine black market in Africa — as well as vaccine theft and falsification
On March 6 2020, a day after SA recorded (https://bhekisisa.org/resources/2020-09-21-mapping-a-virus-tracking-the-spread-of-south-africas-covid-19-outbreak/) its first confirmed case of Covid-19 and a few weeks after Egypt became the first African country (https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200215-sitrep-26-covid-19.pdf) to register an infection, Ugandan police arrested a traditional healer and his daughter in a village 120km east of Kampala.
As police spokesperson Fred Enanga told Uganda’s News Vision (https://www.polity.org.za/article/ugandan-father-daughter-arrested-for-selling-fake-covid-19-vaccine-2020-03-11) newspaper, the pair visited a number of families "telling them that they had discovered a vaccine for the coronavirus disease". Understandably, the families bought the "vaccine"...
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