Chinese police have detained 37 people in a widening scandal over illegal vaccine sales, Xinhua news agency reported, a case Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) said revealed glaring holes in the regulation of the world’s second-largest medicine market.
Police made the arrests in Shandong, the eastern province at the center of the scandal, Xinhua reported yesterday.
The arrests were made after the case, involving nearly US$90 million worth of illegal vaccines, erupted over the past week.
The scandal, which has stirred angry debate in China, casts a shadow over Beijing’s ambitions to bolster its domestic drug market and underlines the challenge it faces to regulate a widespread and fragmented medicine supply chain.
The issue of regulation, from food and drugs to online sales, has become increasingly contentious in China as it looks to cast off a poor reputation for quality and safety.
However, regulators have pointed to a lack of resources and personnel to adequately regulate their sectors.
“This vaccine safety case has drawn close attention, and shows there are many gaps in terms of regulation,” Li said in a statement on the central government’s Web site.
Li said that authorities should improve the regulatory system surrounding vaccine production and distribution, and that any dereliction of duty would not be tolerated.
The Chinese Ministry of Health said that it had not yet found any spike in abnormal reactions to vaccinations, Xinhua reported.
The vaccines, which include those against meningitis, rabies and other illnesses, are suspected of being sold in dozens of provinces in China since 2011.
Angry parents voiced their concerns online. One mother said she wanted to take her child out of China to escape “poisoned milk, gutter oil and ineffective vaccines.”
“It seems every day we are being swindled with something ... and no-one is coming to sort it out,” she wrote on China’s Sina Weibo microblog, using the handle “Sunziyue.”
Police said that a mother and daughter in Shandong had illegally purchased vaccines from traders and sold them on to hundreds of re-sellers in the nation, according to a notice from the Shandong Public Department of Security.
Shandong Zhaoxin Bio-tech, one of three pharmaceutical firms being probed, had also been ordered to halt operations and had a license revoked, Xinhua said, adding that the case would be overseen by China’s top court.
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