Fake COVID-19 vaccines are being sold in South America, Israel’s Galilee Research Institue (MIGAL) stated on Tuesday.

Boxes containing glass vials of the “vaccine” with forged MIGAL labels in Hebrew have been discovered being sold in several South American countries, MIGAL said in a press release. The boxes also contained counterfeit instructions in Hebrew.

MIGAL informed the foreign and health ministres of its discovery, which in turn informed the World Health Organization (WHO) and the health ministries in the relevant South American countries.

The Foreign Ministry’s Economy Department quickly initiated an investigation and managed to trace one of the distributors to Eucador, where the counterfeit vaccines are being widely sold for $380 per unit.

MIGAL also said in its press release that its website was targeted last week in the mass cyberattack on Israeli websites. As YWN reported on Tuesday, Israeli coronavirus vaccine research centers have specifically been targeted in multiple cyberattacks as well as vaccine research centers in other countries throughout the world.

MIGAL was in the headlines in February, when its researchers announced that they are “weeks away” from developing a vaccine against COVID-19. However, even after a vaccine is developed it must go through a riguourous testing process in animal and then human trials before it can reach the manufacturing and production stages. A MIGAL source told the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that the instititute is on target for carrying out human trials on MIGAL’s oral vaccine in early summer.

Scientists at the institute have been developing a vaccine for four years against a coronavirus in poultry called infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) and proved its effectiveness in clinical trials.

When the coronavirus pandemic began, the scientists discovered that COVID-19 shares close genetic similarity with the poultry coronavirus as well as the same infection mechanism, which enabled them to adapt the poultry coronavirus vaccine to a human coronavirus vaccine within a short amount of time.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)