This blog is the Part – II of Counterfeit Viagra Chronicles. Continuing it, let’s delve into how Pfizer tried tackling the fakes of Viagra.
Despite the efforts of campaigns and awareness programs, Pfizer acknowledged that their reach may be limited, leaving a significant portion of the population still susceptible & suffering from the effects.
A much more active solution had to be implemented to tackle this rapidly growing counterfeiting. With the growing number of counterfeit Viagra sales, Pfizer had a plan.
In 2006, Pfizer experimented shipping its first product -Viagra- with radio frequency identification Detection (RFID) tags to its customers only in the United States (since it was a pilot project to test scalability across its production units) to increase patient safety from pharmaceutical counterfeiting. These tags enable pharmacies and wholesalers to verify the unique electronic product code with a special electronic scanner.
RFID tags incorporate the EPC (electronic product code) into each package, case, and pallet of Viagra. Licensed pharmacists and wholesalers use specially designed electronic scanners that communicate the code over the internet to a secure Pfizer website.
“The primary goal for adding the technology is to enhance patient safety,” said Tom McPhillips, vice president of Pfizer’s U.S. Trade Group.
However, the company’s application of RFID was not yet capable of “tracking and tracing” medicines through the distribution system. “Track and trace” requires all parts of the supply chain to invest in compatible technology and agree to capture and share information about product movement.
Franck Germain from Linxens says that in the early 2000s, there were no set standards for RFID in the pharma industry, so the compatibility between systems was not guaranteed. There were some privacy concerns about what is tracked and how data is being used, which is a concern even today.
Transportation of goods from one point to another is vital along the supply chain. Counterfeit products can enter and be passed off as genuine products, as they are being “supplied” directly from the parent company/manufacturer.
“In 2008, four men are reported to have died after consuming (fake) Viagra. Seven others fell into a coma, in addition to over 135 who fell sick.”
These numbers are baffling to hear. That means fake Viagra is not just ineffective but also poses health risks like allergic reactions, poisoning, organ failure, and even death.
In hopes of further solving loopholes in its supply chain, Pfizer Global Security performed a chemical study on the pills sold as Pfizer’s Viagra. Twenty-two websites included among the top search results for the keyword “buy Viagra” in 2011 were inspected. The investigation discovered that around 80% of these tablets were fraudulent.
The experiment RFID implementation in Pfizer’s Supply Chain in the USA yielded no appreciating results. Counterfeiting of Viagra post-2006 continued to occur in large numbers in America. In January 2013, customs officials intercepted 180,000 counterfeit Viagra pills at Miami International Airport.
As reported by the New York Times, experts say Pfizer could be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in potential sales of Viagra, a blockbuster drug with sales of more than $2 billion in 2012.
As it turned out, RFID was just a smarter version of 2D barcodes. RFIDs were also expensive in the 2000s, resulting in double-loss for Pfizer – loss to counterfeiting and increased cost of packaging & supply chain. There was no measurable return from the implementation as counterfeited Viagra seemed to have overgrown the original size.
A potential cause could be that Pfizer placed the onus of trust in the supply chain and not in the hands of its customers (patients). The special scanner meant that only the licensed pharmacist could verify the drug before the sale. With the growth of eCommerce and omnichannel sales, consumers’ inability to verify the authenticity of Viagra forced them to trust the packaging implicitly. Getting the special scanner with every consumer was (and still is) impractical.
According to Forbes, research shows that up to 77 percent of the Viagra sold online is fake and that fewer than one percent of online pharmacies can be trusted. That means Viagra bought online may have never been scanned to know its authenticity. There is no way for a consumer to know if the Viagra they bought was tracked in Pfizer’s system and, more importantly, for them to verify first-hand the authenticity of the drug they are going to consume.
A much more effective system is needed to keep counterfeits at bay and provide consumer safety. The system can be used to track the supply chain, trace back through the supply chain, and empower consumers (and everyone else) to verify the authenticity. Pfizer’s tryst with RFID has proven that it is an expensive and incomplete solution.
The potential solution should be non clonable (cannot be re-created with minimal effort) and verifiable using standard devices like smartphones. It should also be cost-effective to allow implementation across geographies and scale across drugs in all price brackets. Enabling consumers to verify authenticity and communicating this repeatedly is the only way to prevent revenue loss and deaths.
Brand protection solutions from NOOS ensure that we meet the below baselines in every product we build, namely:
Security: Integrity of product information is retained without the ability to clone or tamper with.
Accessibility: Consumers can easily verify authenticity using a standard smartphone or by sending an image via messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Cost-Effective: With multiple layers of security, our solutions are cost effective compared to conventional serialized 2D barcodes in the long run.
Convenience and ease of deployment: It can be directly printed on packaging or mono cartons, making it operationally efficient for online and offline retailers.
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