Vaccines seized in Campeche are false: Russia

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) based in Moscow, thanked the Mexican authorities on Thursday, March 18th, for seizing a fake batch of the Russian Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V.

“One day earlier, the General Administration of Customs and the Mexican Army confiscated a fake batch of vaccines, the design, and packaging of which mimicked the Russian Sputnik V vaccine”, the Russian agency Sputnik said.

“The RDIF thanks the Government of Mexico, the customs authorities, and the Armed Forces of that country for the seizure of a fake batch of the Russian Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V,” says the statement.

“Earlier today, Mexican authorities seized a batch of vaccines designed and packaged as Sputnik V,” said the sovereign wealth fund RDIF.

“Analysis of the photographs of the seized batch, including the packaging and label design, suggest that it is a fake substance that has nothing to do with the original vaccine,” the statement read.

The first shipment of the Sputnik V vaccine, a delivery of 200,000 doses, arrived in Mexico on February 23. It was approved for emergency use by Mexican regulators early last month.

The batch of 5,775 fake doses seized at the Campeche International Airport in Mexico, according to a government statement, was en route on a private plane to Honduras.

The bottles, whose labels were misspelled in Russian, were hidden between soda cans inside an icebox, images shared by the government showed.

“Each batch of the Sputnik V vaccine is subjected to the strictest control and each vial has a unique QR code that allows RDIF and its partners to trace its origin,” the statement says.

According to the statement, the attempt to supply a batch of fake vaccines “is an example of possible provocations against the Russian drug, of which the Russian media warned last week.”

Both the security of supply and the authenticity of the vaccine are of priority importance to the RDIF, which will continue to work with governments and partners around the world to jointly identify the fake Sputnik V vaccine and ensure the security of the supply chain, it adds.

Last week a senior Kremlin official informed the Russian media that “the United States and its allies plan to launch a massive information campaign aimed at shaping a biased attitude towards Russian scientific advances in the fight against the coronavirus.”

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