Between the tainted milk scandal several years ago that made 300,000 babies sick and the current vaccine scandal, Chinese parents are fed up.
Self-identified Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is touring the country and selling her promise of a socialist paradise with guaranteed jobs, free college, and of course, free healthcare for all. By sheer coincidence, a public health crisis is unfolding in China right now which shows the deep-rooted flaws of socialized medicine.
In China, vaccine production is heavily subsidized by the government and vaccines are given to children through the government’s mandatory vaccination program. Sounds pretty good, right? But last Friday, Chinese Food and Drug authorities revealed that one Chinese drug company, Jilin-based Changchun Changsheng Bio-technology, has sold about 252,600 substandard DPT vaccines — used to prevent diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus — to the Shandong Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a government agency in charge of public health for about 100 million people.
The inferior DPT vaccines were given to an unknown number of Chinese babies, some as young as three-months old. This latest revelation came merely five days after the authorities disclosed the same drug company has forged testing and production data on 113,000 rabies vaccines it produced and sold.
Unfortunately, Changchun Changsheng Bio-technology isn’t the first Chinese drug company that has pushed substandard products to Chinese children through a government compulsory health program. Chinese children were frequently given inferior vaccines in the past.
The Guardian reports: “In 2016, $90m in vaccines were found to be stored improperly in Shandong province. The year before, hundreds of children in Henan province reportedly fell ill after being given out-of-date vaccines. In 2010, a newspaper in Shanxi province reported unrefrigerated vaccines had killed four children.”
Only last November, another major Chinese vaccine maker, the state-run Wuhan Institute of Biological Products sold 400,520 inferior DPT vaccines to several local government agencies, which were then given to countless children through the state-run vaccination programs. Every time, officials denied there were problems with vaccines at first and were quick to punish media who dared to report these scandals — the editor of the newspaper that reported the story in Shanxi was fired immediately.
The Chinese government insists that there are no reports of any children falling ill after being given the latest batch of substandard DPT vaccines. But in a country where there is no freedom of press and bad news is heavily censored by the government, we don’t know if it is true no children were affected by these substandard vaccines, or if the government simply suppressed any negative reports from the public eyes.
