eBay pulls plug on sale of flu shots

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.boston.com/business/techn..._of_flu_shots/

EBay pulls plug on sale of flu shots
By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff, 12/18/2003

The way Canadian Brent Graham figured it, this was "just the American way."



Graham, a fuel wholesaler, sniffed opportunity when he saw reports on CNN about his panicked neighbors to the south scrambling for scarce flu vaccine. So he turned to the 21st-century version of the town square, eBay, and offered for sale four vials of vaccine, each good for 10 shots.

His opening price: $500 a vial, roughly five times what he paid for the vaccine at pharmacies in Canada, where the shots are available over the counter.

"Our whole economy is based on supply and demand," Graham said yesterday in a telephone interview from the Vancouver area, where he lives. "If I've got something that people want and there's a demand for it, I should just put it out there, and maybe I can make a buck out of it."

Problem is, selling vaccines over eBay violates both the website's internal policies as well as federal drug laws.

"It has to be sold through a licensed provider -- not to mention it has to be a licensed product," said Lenore Gelb, spokeswoman for the US Food and Drug Administration. "It can't be from Canada. It has to be a licensed product in the United States."

Flu vaccine became a coveted commodity in recent weeks, when the influenza season's early -- and forceful -- arrival caused flu-shot stockpiles to dwindle rapidly. An official of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency had heard of other rogue attempts to buy and sell vaccine but declined to specify them, for fear of inspiring copycats.

"All of these vaccines should be administered by a healthcare professional," CDC spokeswoman Rhonda Smith said. "Essentially, if a person opts to buy over the Internet, then who knows what they're really getting?"

By midday yesterday, no bids for Graham's vaccine had been registered, and by late afternoon, after a Globe reporter had made inquiries to eBay, the offering had been stripped from the site by the San Jose, Calif., company.

Every day, about 2 million new listings are posted on eBay, company spokesman Chris Donlay said. While monitors scout for products that break the site's rules, the sheer volume means eBay must also rely on users to spy violations.

"We don't see the items before they're listed, we don't authenticate them," Donlay said.

Graham said he had the vaccine manufactured by pharmaceutical giant Aventis. He said he'd received one inquiry from a potential buyer who identified himself as a pharmacist in Connecticut. He's still hoping to make a sale, Graham said. Medical ethics would dictate that when a drug is in short supply, it should go first to those who need it most -- not the highest bidder, said George Annas, chairman of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health.

"Sure, this is unethical, but it's not a lot different from stuff we do in medicine every day," Annas said.