Coronavirus black market flourishes in Pakistan as greed replaces compassion

It is said that greed has no boundaries and the greedy are always in demand. But during this pandemic, avaricehas replaced compassion in most countries.

As coronavirus chaos has envelopedPakistan, with hospitals overflowing, doctors dying and infections escalating at an unmanageable rate, a dangerous black market in blood plasma has emerged.

At the time when Pakistan’s healthcare system is on the ‘brink of collapse’, the blood plasma of recovered coronavirus patients is being sold for more than 3000 euros to those who are desperately looking for a cure.

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Convalescent plasmais being trialled around the world as a possible treatment for the COVID-19. It contains antibodies generated by the immune systems of people who have recovered from the fatal disease.

Selling it or paying donors is illegal in most countries including India. However, in Pakistan, it's a means of business.

Doctors in government hospitals in capital Islamabad said they had witnessed transactions between patients and mediators. Usually a patient’s family approaches someone who has recovered from Coronavirus, asking them to donate blood plasma.

When a certain amount is agreed upon as payment, (usually between 300,000 and 500,000 Pakistanirupees), they go to a private lab and extract the plasma, which is then ‘donated’ to the suffering patient.

Sources at the federal investigation agency confirmed they were aware of the unregulated black market sales of blood plasma but that it was up to the police to investigate individual cases. However, it is doing nothing about it as it gets a share from these illicit deals.

Doctors said that hospitals in Islamabad had also run out of vital drugs, such as dexamethasone which was recently proven to help in Covid-19 recovery, as well oxygen cylinders, because they had been stolen and were now being sold for 25 times the market price on the black market.

Pakistan now has one of the fastest infection rates in the world, with 185,000 confirmed cases and upwards of 5,000 new infections a day. The planning minister, Asad Umar, has said cases could multiply eightfold by the end of July and hit 1.2 million.

Lockdown restrictions were lifted in Pakistan on 18 May by the supreme court when it said the virus was “not a pandemic in Pakistan” and questioned why the fight to contain it was “swallowing so much money”.