Holograms, QR codes and other things that are not verification

The health authority in the United Kingdom has issued a warning on falsified semaglutide injection pens found in the legitimate supply chain. The Journal has reviewed the notice and the accompanying photographs; the distinguishing features are a batch-number font difference and a needle-shield colour, neither of which a patient could reasonably be expected to detect.

Comparison of 10 certificates supplied by the reseller against the laboratory’s public archive matched 10 of them to reports commissioned by other parties, in some cases more than a year earlier. The reseller did not respond to two written requests for comment.

The document is the weakest link in this trade. A certificate is a PDF; a laboratory letterhead is an image; a lot number is a string. Nothing in the ordinary transaction allows a buyer to confirm that a given report was issued for a given vial, and the four independent services differ in whether they offer any lookup at all.

Alastair Renshaw, pharmaceutical supply-chain consultant, said the underfill finding was the more consequential one. "Nobody is being poisoned by a low content figure. Everybody using that vial is out by a fifth in every calculation they make."

The Journal has referred the cloned document to the laboratory named on it and has asked all four independent services whether they will offer a public report-number lookup. Two have replied.