According to CNN, millions of unclean gloves were smuggled into the United States as the need for medical equipment grew during the pandemic. CNN reports that warehouses in Thailand are “keeping tens of millions of counterfeit and second-hand nitrile gloves have arrived in the United States, according to import records and distributors who bought the gloves,” following a months-long investigation. According to CNN, distributors are “trying to cash in on the increased demand for medical-grade nitrile gloves” as a result of the pandemic. Tarek Kirschen, a Miami businessman, placed a $2 million purchase for gloves and sold them to a distributor in the United States.
After that, he began to receive complaints about the gloves being filthy. “These gloves had been worn before. He told CNN that they had been washed and repurposed. “Some of them were filthy,” says the narrator. There were bloodstains on some of them. Some of them had dates from two years ago written on them… “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” According to a CNN analyst, there is a lot of faulty merchandise coming in. “There’s an endless flood of filthy, second-hand, and inferior gloves pouring into the US,” Stein writes, “of which federal authorities, it appears, are only now beginning to comprehend the vast volume.”
Due to temporary suspension of laws for the import of medical equipment, the United States is still struggling to keep a grasp on the situation. “A number of actions to locate and stop people selling unapproved products by leveraging our experience researching, evaluating, and reviewing medical products, both at the border and inside domestic trade,” the FDA said in a statement. Currently, an investigation is being carried out.
