Dr.Vorobev, a “medical jewelry” company based in Kostroma, Russia, has been getting a lot of attention for the sterling silver coronavirus-shaped pendants it has been selling since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sold online for 1,000 rubles ($13), the coronavirus pendant created by Dr. Vorobev has become a very controversial piece of jewelry on Russian social media. While some people buy it and post photos of themselves wearing it on their Instagram and VK accounts, other criticize the company for trying to make money off a global health crisis that has already killed tens of thousands around the world.  Pavel Vorobyov, the founder of Dr. Vorobev, insists that the pendant is a gesture of support for health professionals, not a way to exploit the current crisis.

Photo: Dr. Vorobev

“Our purpose and mission with this project is to support our doctors,” Vorobyov told Russian radio station Govorit Moskva. “It can be a talisman or some kind of amulet for them, a symbol of victory over the virus.”

“Our followers on social media are respectable people – doctors and people with ties to medicine,” the jeweler added, claiming that many of the patients diagnosed with Covid-19 bought the pendant as gifts for the doctors who saved their lives.

Dr. Vorobev  apparently saw the opportunity very early on, starting work on it as soon as microscopic images of the novel coronavirus became available, “before anyone in Russia had heard about it”. As a medical jewelry brand that also creates jewels shaped like DNA double helixes, and organs like hearts and lungs, Dr. Vorobev considers its decision to make a coronavirus-shaped pendant “natural”.

Photo: Dr. Vorobev

“People started buying it, posting the product on their social media pages,” Pavel Vorobev, the firm’s founder, told Reuters. “No matter how sad it is, it has become a trend. It has had a viral effect.”

Dr. Vorobev claims to have already sold over 1,000 coronavirus pendants all around the world, and expects to start seeing “bulk orders” from clinics soon. The company also plans to start offering brooches shaped as caged coronaviruses to doctors working to slow the spread of Covid-19.