Doctor selling fake vaccine to cure coronavirus held in Karachi

KARACHI: Police on Monday nabbed an alleged doctor selling a vaccine to cure coronavirus in Defence area of the city, ARY NEWS reported.

According to police, it carried out a raid at a fake clinic, where a doctor has advertised selling a vaccine to cure coronavirus.

The police arrested him and shifted to another location for probe into the matter.

According to SSP South, the man arrested was a dentist by profession and is identified as Dr Dedar. “He is booked under sections of Pakistan Penal Code for fooling people,” he said.

Sindh province has remained the most affected from the virus as it reported 150 cases by Friday out of the total tally of 186 cases across the country.

It is pertinent to mention here a vaccine is yet to be prepared to cure the coronavirus with top medical research institutes across the globe competing with each other.

On March 14, as the deadly coronavirus is gripping the world at a fast pace, the scientists have decided against testing the vaccine on animals and will proceed with the human trials of it within days, shunning a routine practice.

“I don’t think proving this in an animal model is on the critical path to getting this to a clinical trial,” said Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech that has produced a Covid-19 vaccine candidate at record speed.

He told STAT that scientists at the National Institutes of Health are “working on nonclinical research in parallel.” Meanwhile, the clinical trial started recruiting healthy participants in the first week of March.

That isn’t how vaccine testing normally happens. Regulators require that a manufacturer show a product is safe before it goes into people, and while it isn’t enshrined in law, researchers almost always check that a new concoction is effective in lab animals before putting human volunteers at potential risk.

Meanwhile, the development came as scientists in Britain said a vaccine could be tested on humans by June after encouraging results on mice.

Scientists from Imperial College London said that clinical trials could take place in a few months’ time if they receive funding after trials on mice gave promising results.

“Currently we have a prototype vaccine in animal models where the early results are encouraging,” Dr Robin Shattock told a British media outlet.