Just kidding.
You may have read the story on TMZ of a New York businessman making big bucks off the panic surrounding Ebola. Guess what? The FDA hit him where it hurts. His site is down.
Stop trying to trick the public. Stop being sleazy. That’s the message the FDA is sending to pharmaceutical, medical device, and nutritional product companies with its recent Warning Letter spree – three in two days – regarding the shady use of marketing tactics.
The Warning Letters were sent to Ebola-C, LifeSilver, and Bodyhealth, all of which promoted products that were implied to prevent and/or fight Ebola.
In the letters, the FDA states:
“The marketing and sale of unapproved or uncleared Ebola virus-related products are a potentially significant threat to the public health. Therefore, FDA is taking urgent measures to protect consumers from products that, without approval or clearance by FDA, claim to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, treat or cure the Ebola disease in people.”
The companies used product names and website domains to imply the treatment of Ebola, as well as made claims on their websites and Facebook pages.
Examples of claims cited in the letters:
- The name of your product “Ebola –C”
- “DEFEND YOURSELF NOW!!!!! EBOLA-C®”
- “SPECIFICALLY FORMULATED FOR Ebola-C®”
- “NEW! Ebola and Virus Immunization Page CLICK HERE”
- “Ebola Virus, Are you worried? bodyhealth.com … Stay proactive- BodyHealth recommends these preventative measures to lower risk.”
- “EBOLA . . . The information below . . . was written for flu prevention during the swine and avian flu scares. It is relevant to the current — Ebola hysteria . . . . I have been reviewing our nano-catalytic silver hydrosol virus studies, some of which are posted at our website www.lifesilver.com/v1 . . .”
According to the FDA, the companies have 15 days to respond to the FDA with the steps they have taken or plan to take to address the violations.
At last check, Ebola-C.com is down and both LifeSilver and Bodyhealth have removed all mentions of Ebola. I should mention, though, that Google does in fact show the word “Ebola” in some of its search results (screenshots below) that relate to these companies’ domain names, most likely due to a delay in website indexing.
