Nationwide hunt for danger vaccines
Print Edition
ALMOST a year after a crackdown on an illegal vaccines operation, authorities are no nearer to ascertaining the whereabouts of more than 2 million dangerous doses sent to cities throughout China.
Details of the raid only emerged yesterday when news website thepaper.cn quoted police in Jinan, capital of east China’s Shandong Province, as saying that an alleged ringleader, surnamed Pang, had been found trading in 25 kinds of vaccine from a warehouse without temperature controlled facilities.
Pang and her daughter, surnamed Sun, have been charged with running an illegal business. In 2009, police said, Pang was sentenced to three years in prison, with a five-year reprieve, for a similar offense.
The vaccines, for flu, rabies, hepatitis B and other common diseases, are licensed, but not safe because failure to store and transport them properly was very likely to have nullified their effect, the website reported.
When police raided the warehouse in April last year, they seized more than 20,000 doses, many near their expiry date. However, according to Pang’s account books, more than 2 million doses had already been distributed.
An official with the drug and food administration in Jinan told the website this week that local authorities in 20 cities across the nation had been called to help trace the vaccines.
Shanghai’s Health and Family Planning Commission said yesterday that none of the problematic vaccines had ended up in the city.
Police said Pang, 47, a former doctor from Heze in Shandong, had been buying vaccines from more than 70 dealers and pharmaceutical salespeople and reselling them at a profit. Police put the value of the transactions at 570 million yuan (US$88.12 million) and said the business had been operating since 2010.
Vaccines should be stored and transported at 2 to 8 degree Celsius. But at Pang’s warehouse, the temperature was almost 14 degree Celsius. Before sending them by express delivery, she just added ice cubes to the packages, police said.
Wang Yuedan, a deputy professor at Peking University’s immunology department, said: “It’s equal to killing people.” He told the website that vaccines ensured that recipients were immune to certain diseases but that anyone receiving improperly stored vaccines could still die after contracting the disease they thought they were immune to.
Hao Yonggang, an investigator with Jinan’s food and drug watchdog, said that the danger arose because of a loophole in management.
He said pharmaceutical salespeople, whose incomes were linked to sales, would exaggerate the number of vaccines ordered by medical institutions, and then sell the extra to unscrupulous dealers.
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