Nations around the world are waiting in eager anticipation as they are hoping to secure regulatory approval for the Covid-19 vaccine, which is said to offer up to 95 percent protection against Sars-CoV2. But it appears that the vaccine is already available on the darknet.
There are multiple vendors who appear to be selling doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to worldwide customers for as much as $1,300 a piece on dark web markets.
One of the listing read, “The doses of the COVID-19 vaccine has [sic] been developed by Pfizer and BioNTec,” and “We can deliver in any country.”
The vendors claim to be pharmacists, saying that they acquired the vaccine through the government and have already sold it to multiple customers. One vendor claimed to have a stockpile of some 560 doses. One of the vendor provided a high-quality stock image of a vial labelled “Coronavirus Vaccine”.
Pandemic profiteering is nothing new on darknet markets. In April, multiple darknet vendors were selling what they claimed to be the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients for nearly $16,000 per liter, even promising prospective buyers “a life immunity against coronavirus”. Then, again in September, another darkweb vendor on the same marketplace advertised at-home COVID testing kits—claiming he’d made more than $1.4 million selling them to hospitals without enough resources.
Even “vaccines” have been advertised in darknet marketplaces since as early as April, along with an ever-expanding cornucopia of remedies, tonics and tinctures. Now though, as countries continue to set new records for daily infections, demand is at an all-time high.
So is it possible that darkweb vendors are actually selling the the real vaccines or is this an elaborate scam?
Dr Barbara Mintzes, who is the associate professor at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and School of Pharmacy, urged people to be careful about what they purchase online.
She said: “There are so many red flags here, it’s hard to know where to start, .. Even just on the regular Internet, there’s that whole question of: if a person is buying a prescription medicine or something like a vaccine, are they actually getting what they think they’re getting? There’s absolutely no assurance.”
Dr Mintzes said “This is a particularly odd one, in the sense that the vaccine needs to be kept at minus-70 degrees centigrade. And this is before it has even been rolled out for use in the UK.” This means that a vial of Pfizer isn’t something that can be shipped out in the post, and it’s unclear how exactly these sellers (pharmacists or not) are getting their hands on the drug in the first place.
Even if we assume that the “Pfizer vaccines” being sold on darknet marketplaces are the real deal though, Dr Mintzes noted that there are a whole raft of ethical and public health issues that arise from that. For one: the problem of diminishing supply.
Dr Mintzes Conclusion on the darknet cavvines
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” she concludes. “One side is that from a public health perspective, there’s a very good reason the vaccine is being rolled out the way it is. The second side is that you have absolutely no guarantee that you would be getting the actual product. And then the other side is that it’s actually encouraging unethical activities.”