Spiralling demand, leakages and a flourishing black market for remdesivir

Artificial shortages and brazen hawking of the drug on the streets at 15x the normal price rule the day as the official machinery tries desparately to stamp out the parallel market

The day Preeti Mishra (name changed) was waiting in her car to give a swab sample at a laboratory near AIIMS in the capital, hawkers kept walking past the line of cars selling remdesivir.
 
“They were offering a 50 per cent discount on the ‘prevailing rates’ and each vial was Rs 40,000 or so,” said 35-year-old Mishra. She was familiar with the price because her family and friends had paid a massively inflated black market price of Rs 50,000 for a vial of the anti-coronavirus drug when they needed it recently for a family member. “They we­re selling like