For safe vaccines, Chinese go abroad

BEIJING — Apple Zhou doesn’t trust Chinese vaccines.

She took her 2-year-old son to Hong Kong to get his tetanus shot, a trip that cost $3,000 — and she will do it again the next time he needs any preventive treatment.

But after a pair of China’s biggest vaccine makers acknowledged last month selling mislabeled and faulty medications, Zhou’s just-tobe-safe attitude chilled into fear.

“I was thinking about having a second child,” she said, “and now I’m beginning to hesitate.”

In a country that manufactures 95 percent of its vaccines, parents are increasingly opting to get medicines imported from Europe and elsewhere. Poorer families, meanwhile, are left wondering if they can trust the shots at local clinics.

Public confidence in the country’s $4.4 billion vaccine industry took a blow on July 15, when inspectors reported that Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology had sold more than 250,000 defective vaccines to protect children against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus.

The company also faked inspection reports, authorities found.

Then, China’s drug watchdog announced that another company, the state-owned Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, had also peddled ineffective vaccines. The firm started recalling about 400,000 doses in May and must now pay an unspecified fine, the China Food and Drug Administration said.

Hundreds of thousands of children are thought to have been injected with the useless medicine, officials said. They thus far appear unharmed, except for a prolonged vulnerability to otherwise preventable diseases.