A Miami man has pleaded guilty in federal court to distributing counterfeit HIV medications to U.S. patients.
Miami Herald | Tribune News Service | Getty Images
A Miami man pleaded guilty to distributing as much as $25 million worth of misbranded and counterfeit HIV drugs dispensed by pharmacies across the U.S. to unsuspecting patients, federal prosecutors said.
Armando Herrera, 43, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for the crime.
Herrera pleaded guilty Monday in U.S. District Court in Miami to one count of conspiring to introduce counterfeit and generic drugs into the U.S. market, court records show.
A medicine is falsified if the medicine has been replaced in whole or in part by a substance.
Herrera and his co-conspirators set up companies in the states of Texas, California, and Washington that purchased large quantities of counterfeit and counterfeit HIV medications through legal channels, counterfeited the packaging of the pills, and sold them at a steep discount to wholesalers who later sold them to pharmacies sold. , according to court documents.
Prosecutors said the wholesalers were involved in the criminal scheme, but the pharmacies were unaware that the drugs had been altered or misbranded.
The counterfeit and misbranded drugs included Truvada, Biktarvy and other unnamed drugs.
Truvada is prescribed to prevent HIV infection in people at risk of contracting the virus. The drug is also used in combination with other medications to treat infections.
Biktarvy is prescribed to treat HIV infection. Truvada and Biktarvy are manufactured by Gilead Sciences.
Herrera and his co-conspirators received between $16.7 million and $25 million in payments from two wholesalers, according to court documents.
The documents did not say how Herrera and his co-conspirators obtained the drugs.
Medicines are often diverted from the legal market by purchasing them from individual patients who have been prescribed the medicines.
Herrera is expected to be sentenced on December 21. His lawyer did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.