BFF-56 Censors jump into action as China’s latest vaccine scandal ignites

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HEALTH-CHINA-DRUGS

Censors jump into action as China’s latest vaccine scandal ignites

BEIJING, July 22, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Chinese censors on Sunday deleted
articles and postings about the vaccine industry as an online outcry over the
country’s latest vaccine scandal intensified.

Regulators said last week that they had halted production of a rabies
vaccine at a large pharmaceutical company in the northeast after finding
fabricated records and other problems during an inspection.

It was just the latest in a series of health and safety scandals which
have fuelled fear over the safety of basic food and medicine and anger at
regulators asleep on the job. China’s censors and regulators struggled to
stay abreast of the public’s response, deleting posts on WeChat as state
media tried to take control of the narrative.

On Sunday night China’s Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) announced it
had ordered all production stopped at the vaccine maker and launched an
investigation.

Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology is China’s second largest maker of the
rabies vaccine and a subsidiary of a large publicly-traded vaccine maker.

Anxiety grew over the weekend as an essay alleging corruption and murky
practices in the vaccine industry spread across WeChat. Netizens reposted the
self-published essay as censors swooped in to delete the content.

The CFDA said last week that the problematic rabies vaccine had not left
Changsheng’s factory.

The company said in a stock exchange filing Sunday that it had already
halted production of another vaccine — for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis
— which regulators found last year to be sub-standard and which had also
become the focus of public attention.

Still the action aroused concern that other problematic vaccines had
already been administered to children.

In Beijing, an unnamed official at the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention told local website The Paper that parents in China’s capital need
not worry: “Beijing does not have either of these two vaccines in question,
the public can be at ease.”

Regulators in Guangdong and Sichuan, cited by state broadcaster CCTV, told
residents that Changsheng’s problematic vaccines had not been made available
in their provinces.

But CCTV acknowledged that 250,000 doses of the problematic vaccine had
been sold to the eastern province of Shandong.

Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily said on Sunday that local
regulators must “rapidly take action, do a complete investigation and
announce authoritative information in a timely manner to pacify public
anxiety”.

CCTV listed questions the public needed answering and noted that the local
regulator overseeing Changsheng had hung up on journalists’ calls or declined
to answer the phone.

A similar scandal erupted in Shandong in 2016, involving the improper
storage, transport and sale of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of vaccines
— many of them expired.

For parents it also has parallels to China’s most notorious incident of
recent years. Some 300,000 children fell ill, six of them dying, in a 2008
case involving milk powder contaminated with melamine.

BSS/AFP/FI/ 1722 hrs