Bio-Med MD gets bail in polio vaccine contamination case, drug inspectors apologise to court

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26 Aug, 2025 12:21

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The Ghaziabad District Court has granted bail to Sarayu Garg, managing director of Bio-Med, a vaccine manufacturing company. The court called his arrest, made on behalf of an FIR filed by drug controllers a month ago, ‘unlawful’, as per a report by The Economic Times.

Based in Ghaziabad, Bio-Med came under the scrutiny of Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) in September, when inspectors claimed that they found type 2 polio strain in the vaccines it manufactured. The type 2 virus strain was eradicated in India and the world in 2016.

Many batches of the questionable vaccines manufactured by Bio-Med went into circulation and experts had said they pose a threat of bringing back the deadly disease in India.

The drug inspectors who filed the FIR and arrested Garg have apologised to the court, according to the report. The court made clear in its judgment that an FIR cannot be filed in allegations under section 17A, 17B, 27A, 36C (this deals with offences like manufacturing spurious drugs, misbranding drugs etc) when read along with section 18/27 of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940.

Garg told the paper that the inspectors apologised before the court but not before him. He accused them of illegally searching his campus when senior management of the manufacturing facility was not present.

Garg dismissed the claim of Bio-Med’s polio vaccines being contaminated as false. “How can a man make a mistake in GMP certified, ISO 90001 and ISO 14001 certified facilities—the best credentials for any lab. It is all false and this has  led to the demolition of faith in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Central Drug Lab,” he said.