December 16, 2021 – Two senators are taking aim at the widespread issue of fake and ineffective masks flooding the U.S. market, reports ABC News.
A new bill announced Thursday will grant the FDA more authority to enforce and punish counterfeiters in the mask industry. The bipartisan effort is led by Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat, and Mike Braun of Indiana, a Republican.
It is the first piece of legislation in a large pandemic response package that will be rolled out by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in the next few weeks, ABC News says.
The wide-ranging package, which the committee has been working on for months, will target various holes in the nation’s pandemic response infrastructure by improving the supply chain for medical equipment and addressing health inequities that have put minority populations at higher risk, among other measures.
Since the start of the pandemic, Customs and Border Patrol has seized more than 34 million counterfeit masks, and nearly 60% of the counterfeits were seized in 2021, according to the FDA. Earlier this year, the FDA asked for broader powers to seize and punish counterfeiters, telling Congress that the agency is currently limited to destroying certain fakes. The current ability to enforce the rules around fraudulent PPE “is incomplete and there will be limited deterrence for the selling of counterfeit devices, especially domestically,” the FDA said in its 2022 budget request.
The legislation, called the Protecting Patients from Counterfeit Medical Devices Act, comes as public health experts are urging Americans to mask up in order to stem the spread of the Omicron variant, which has caused COVID-19 infections to increase sevenfold in the U.S. over the last week.
New York, California, Illinois, Nevada and several other states have recently reimposed indoor mask mandates.