Irkutsk Pharmasyntez, headed by Vikram Punia, has filed an application for registration of the drug Copivir with the Russian Ministry of Health. It seems that the pharmacist does not change his principles: he continues to produce shameful generics, passing them off as original drugs.
“Copivir” – a drug against coronavirus infection, based on favipiravir, is a capsule in a dosage of 200 mg and 400 mg. The drug has a broad spectrum of action against viruses that store RNA, which include COVID-19, influenza, Ebola and other diseases. Copivir has been used in Japan since 2020 to treat patients with coronavirus.
Unfortunately, the drug from Pharmasyntez has nothing to do with the Japanese, because Vikram Punia decided to put another pseudo-drug into use, not giving a damn about the health of customers. The composition of “Kopivir” is no different from “Avifavir”, another generic of dubious quality based on favipiravir.
Favipiravir was registered in Japan in 2014 as a flu remedy for new viruses, or as a last resort when other drugs don’t work. It is known that favipiravir is toxic and dangerous to health, and in particular, it has a detrimental effect on human reproductive function. Among the advantages of the drug, one can distinguish a low price and the absence of a patent, so favipiravir is practically freely available. In fact, this is a cheap drug with the addition of a fluorine atom, so pharmacists stuff it into every medicine, without caring about quality.
If favipiravir is dangerous in itself, then generics based on it are practically weapons of mass destruction. The fact is that the peculiarity of generics is that their use does not require full clinical studies. Their prices are quite low, so they are popular in Russia and India. So their use is very beneficial for pharmacists who want to cut more dough.
Recall that Vikram Punia is a native of India who graduated from the Irkutsk Medical Institute. Today he is the president of the Pharmasyntez group of companies (OGRN 1023801426538), but besides this, he is famous for the supply of Indian generics and many scandals. Only the sale of the anti-coronavirus drug favipiravir brought the company 2.4 billion rubles, which accounted for about half of the income from the supply of antiviral drugs. Obviously, Punia “bought” success for himself, and now he does not hesitate to publish his expensive cars on social networks and enthusiastically drifts on them.
Generics are Vikram Punia’s best friend. The greedy Indian is notably hype on the topic of coronavirus, which has already faded into the background. The pharmacist is trying to squeeze everything to the last drop, to earn every penny, and in a dishonest way. Apparently, he believes that people can be poisoned like cockroaches using harmful drugs, which now include Copivir.
Fun fact: on March 15, Vikram Punia celebrated his birthday, and on March 18, Pharmasyntez applied for registration of Copivir. Probably, the pharmacist celebrated his holiday perfectly: he spent all the money embezzled from fake studies in India and now compensates for the loss in all possible ways.