At least in America, there exists and anti vaccine movement and a growing sense of awareness tot he dangers that vaccines pose. Chinese parents have already been leery of the government’s coerced vaccination programs. This current crisis only further shows why the government should let your health be your own business.
Foreign Policy reports
The Chinese party-state seemed quick to respond this month after a major pharmaceutical company was found to have sold over 250,000 substandard vaccines for children. The revelations, based partly on a viral social media post that sparked a frenzy among millions of worried Chinese parents, were called “serious and appalling” by Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping, who pledged a crackdown on unsavory practices in the industry. Premier Li Keqiang said the company’s behavior had “crossed a moral line,” and a normally throttled press was permitted to cover the topic. The China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) opened an investigation and the firm’s chairwoman, “vaccines queen” Gao Junfang, was detained along with 14 others.
But in a country repeatedly hit by regulatory scandals, these measures may not be enough to assuage public anger. China goes through regular cycles of safety-failure revelations, promises from the top of crackdowns and reform, and a rapid return to the norms of faked data and bribed personnel. Even as individual malefactors face punishments, the system is already moving to stop public rage from spreading beyond a single company. And it is unlikely that further arrests and investigations will curb the deeper malaise felt by many, who believe breakneck economic growth and social upheaval has left China with an amoral get-rich-quick culture that puts profits above everything else, even children.
Changsheng Biotechnology, the company at the center of the scandal, is the country’s second-largest maker of rabies and chickenpox vaccines. A week after state regulators announced the firm had outright faked production data about its rabies vaccine, it was revealed that a 2017 batch of 250,000 diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough vaccines had failed safety inspections. Tens of thousands of the vaccines had already been administered to children by public health authorities. While there’s no indication the substandard vaccines have directly caused any injuries or deaths, they may leave some children improperly vaccinated and thus vulnerable to diseases.
The outcry from parents has been huge. One Chinese-trained doctor was babysitting her niece in Zhejiang province when news of the scandal broke. She told Foreign Policy her cousins immediately started panicking and feeling guilty that they, like many other Chinese parents, had chosen domestic vaccines for their children instead of pricy ones from Europe or the United States. “Now there’s a huge shortage of imported vaccines and everyone wants foreign ones,” the doctor, who requested anonymity, said.
The panic was heightened by the already uneasy relationship Chinese parents have with vaccines, which are compulsory for school attendance.The panic was heightened by the already uneasy relationship Chinese parents have with vaccines, which are compulsory for school attendance. Unlike the United States, China does not have a large and organized anti-vaccine movement, while its mass vaccination campaigns have been major public health success stories.
However, distrust of China’s partially privatized health care system runs high, with lots of anger toward overprescribing doctors and corrupt medicine manufacturers. One study found Shanghai parents reluctant to get more vaccines other than free government-provided ones due to a belief doctors were promoting them just to make a quick buck. In 2013, an unsubstantiated report that children were killed by hepatitis B vaccines caused vaccination rates in some areas to plummet. In 2016, a criminal ring was found to have stored about 2 million vaccines in a rundown, unrefrigerated storeroom.
Meanwhile, Chinese food and drug safety remains tarred by the tainted milk formula scandal of 2008, which led to mass recalls, six infant deaths and the hospitalization of more than 50,000 others, and widespread panic by parents. (A few years later, government officials in Beijing enjoyed the exclusive use of a purpose-built organic farm.)
This troubled history meant when the latest vaccine scandal hit, all the official reactions and bluster fell flat for some Chinese. As documented in a Council on Foreign Relations blog, one Weibo user commented that China has “no rule of law. Only party governance,” while a viral post pointed out that Li Keqiang had used similar wording to describe the previous vaccine scandal from 2016. Even the reliably pro-government state media news anchor Wang Guan called the scandal a “disgrace” on Twitter, saying that “Without sound institutional design on rule of law/supervision, history will keep repeating itself.”
The problem is deeply rooted, said Bill Hsiao, a Harvard professor of economics specializing in public health who has spent decades analyzing and advising China’s health care system. Starting in the 1990s, China encouraged domestic production of modern vaccines and drugs partly to alleviate a lack of foreign exchange reserves, but the thousands of private companies this effort spawned were prone to colluding with local governments to skirt potentially costly regulations.
“For you to become a mayor and generate the revenue needed to lubricate different corrupt officials, the first thing you do is establish a tobacco manufacturing plant, and second a pharmaceutical plant,” said Hsiao, recalling a “common country saying” he’d heard among officials and others in China. “That’s how powerful stakeholders and various interest groups became so widespread in pharmaceuticals.”
Vaccines became a highly lucrative business; in 2016, Forbes estimated the net worth of Changsheng Biotechnology chairwoman Gao Junfang and her family at $1 billion. But corruption made Chinese pharmaceuticals exceedingly difficult to reform. In 2007, China executed the former head of the CFDA for exchanging state licenses for payments from pharma companies. One government-ordered self-assessment reportedly saw over 80 percent of companies withdraw their new drug applications due to faulty or fraudulent clinical trial data. Chinese media recently reported that Changsheng sales staff had been subject to more than 10 bribery convictions since 2010 for paying off hospital workers.
The government forced these vaccines on these children and now they suffer ill health as a consequence. This is also a consequence of big pharmaceutical companies trying to cut costs and maximize profit. Punishing the guilty parties is not going to repair the damage that has been done. Let’s hope that this will serve as an example to the Chinese state to regulate healthcare corporations while simultaneously allowing parents the choice of their children’s healthcare.
The post Chinese vaccine panic reaches boiling point appeared first on The Duran.