EPA asks Amazon and eBay to remove unproven COVID-10 disinfectants

[whohit]EPA asks Amazon and eBay to remove unproven COVID-10 disinfectants[/whohit]The Trump administration is ordering two of the largest e-commerce marketplaces in the United States — Amazon and eBay — to stop selling unproven or unsafe disinfectants, including products falsely marketed as killing COVID-19.

The Environmental Protection Agency late Wednesday issued orders to the two companies directing them to stop selling or distributing 70 products, including sprays, lanyards, and other gear sometimes touted as “preventing epidemics.”

Under the EPA orders, the companies are obligated to take the products off their websites and certify they have done so. Failure to comply with the stop-sale notices could expose the companies to civil penalties of as much as $20,288 per sale.

The EPA action is the latest move by US regulators to stem the sale of masks, cleaners, and other products that are falsely billed as helping safeguard people from the lethal coronavirus. Federal officials also have seized shipments of bogus treatments and protective gear entering the United States.

Ashley Settle, an eBay representative, said early Thursday that the company was supportive of the EPA’s “efforts to prohibit the sale of items making fraudulent health claims.”

“Since the outbreak,” Settle added, “we have been employing a combination of digital and manual surveillance tools to remove products like those marketed with the term ‘coronavirus,’ which violates our policies regarding making unsubstantiated health claims.”

An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement that the company requires that sellers “provide accurate information on product detail pages and put processes in place to proactively block inaccurate claims about COVID-19 before they are published to our store. We’ve also developed specific tools for COVID-19 that run 24/7 to scan the hundreds of millions of product detail pages for any inaccurate claims that our initial filters may have missed.”